XI.
The fullness of George Eliot's mind at this time may be gathered from the rapidity with which one work followed another. A book from her pen had been appearing regularly each year. The Scenes from Clerical Life had appeared in book form in 1858, Adam Bede was printed in 1859, The Mill on the Floss came out in 1860, and now, in 1861, followed Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe. It is with the greatest reluctance that I find myself obliged to pass this book without comment. In some particulars Silas Marner is the most remarkable novel in our language. On the one hand, when I read the immortal scene at the Rainbow Inn where the village functionaries, the butcher, the farrier, the parish clerk and so on are discussing ghosts, bullocks and other matters over their evening ale, my mind runs to Dogberry and Verges and the air feels as if Shakspeare were sitting somewhere not far off. On the other hand, the downright ghastliness of the young Squire's punishment for stealing the long-hoarded gold of Silas Marner the weaver, always carries me straight to that pitiless Pardoner's Tale of Chaucer in which gold is so cunningly identified with death. I am sure you will pardon me if I spend a single moment in recalling the plots of these two stories so far as concerns this point of contact. In Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale three riotous young men of Flanders are drinking one day at a tavern. In the midst of their merriment they hear the clink of a bell before a dead body which is borne past the door on its way to burial. They learn that it is an old companion who is dead; all three become suddenly inflamed with mortal anger against Death; and they rush forth resolved to slay him wherever they may find him. Presently they meet an old man. "Why do you live so long?" they mockingly inquire of him. "Because," says he,
"Deth, alas, ne will not han my lif;
Thus walke I like a resteles caitif,
And on the ground, which is my modres gate,
I knocke with my staf erlich and late
And say to hire 'Leve moder, let me in.'"
"Where is this Death of whom you have spoken?" furiously demand the three young men. The old man replied, "You will find him under an oak tree in yonder grove." The three rush forward; and upon arriving at the oak find three bags full of gold coin. Overjoyed at their good fortune they are afraid to carry the treasure into town by day lest they be suspected of robbery. They therefore resolve to wait until night and in the meantime to make merry. For the latter purpose one of the three goes to town after food and drink. As soon as he is out of hearing, the two who remain under the tree resolve to murder their companion on his return so that they may be the richer by his portion of the treasure; he, on the other hand, whilst buying his victual in town, shrewdly drops a great lump of poison into the bottle of drink he is to carry back so that his companions may perish and he take all.
To make a long story short, the whole plot is carried out. As soon as he who was sent to town returns, his companions fall upon him and murder him; they then proceed merrily to eat and drink what he has brought; the poison does its work; presently all three lie dead under the oak tree by the side of the gold, and the old man's direction has come true, and they have found death under that tree. In George Eliot's story the young English Squire also finds death in finding gold. You will all remember how Dunstan Cass in returning late at night from a fox-hunt on foot—for he had killed his horse in the chase—finds himself near the stone hut where Silas Marner the weaver has long plied his trade, and where he is known to have concealed a large sum in gold. The young man is extraordinarily pressed for money; he resolves to take Marner's gold; the night is dark and misty; he makes his way through the mud and darkness to the cottage and finds the door open, Marner being, by the rarest of accidents, away from the hut. The young man quickly discovers the spot in the floor where the weaver kept his gold; he seizes the two heavy leathern bags filled with guineas; and the chapter ends. "So he stepped forward into the darkness." All this occurs in Chapter IV. The story then proceeds; nothing more is heard of Dunstan Cass in the village for many years; the noise of the robbery has long ago died away; Silas Marner has one day found a golden head of hair lying on the very spot of his floor where he used to finger his own gold; the little outcast who had fallen asleep with her head in this position, after having wandered into Marner's cottage, has been brought up by him to womanhood; when one day, at a critical period in Silas Marner's existence, it happens that in draining some lower grounds the pit of an old stone quarry, which had for years stood filled with rain-water near his house, becomes dry, and on the bottom is revealed a skeleton with a leathern bag of gold in each hand. The young man plunging out into the dark, laden with his treasure, had fallen in and lain for all these years to be afterwards brought to light as another phase of the frequent identity between death and gold. Here, too, one is obliged to remember those doubly dreadful words in Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo having with difficulty bought poison from the apothecary, cries:
"There is thy gold; worse poison to men's souls,
Doing more murder in this loathsome world
Than these poor compounds which thou mayst not sell.
I sell thee poison, thou hast sold me none.
Farewell; buy food and get thyself in flesh."
I must also instance one little passing picture in Silas Marner which though extremely fanciful, is yet, a charming type of some of the greatest and most characteristic work that George Eliot has done. Silas Marner had been a religious enthusiast of an obscure sect of a small manufacturing town of England; suddenly a false accusation of theft in which the circumstantial evidence was strong against him brings him into disgrace among his fellow-disciples. With his whole faith in God and man shattered he leaves his town, wanders over to the village of Raveloe, begins aimlessly to pursue his trade of weaving, presently is paid for some work in gold; in handling the coin he is smit with the fascination of its yellow radiance, and presently we find him pouring out all the prodigious intensity of his nature, which had previously found a fitter field in religion, in the miser's passion. Working day and night while yet a young man he fills his two leathern bags with gold; and George Eliot gives us some vivid pictures of how, when his day's work would be done, he would brighten up the fire in his stone hut which stood at the edge of the village, eagerly lift up the particular brick of the stone floor under which he kept his treasure concealed, pour out the bright yellow heaps of coin and run his long white fingers through them with all the miser's ecstasy. But after he is robbed the utter blank in his soul—and one can imagine such a blank in such a soul, for he was essentially religious—becomes strangely filled. One day a poor woman leading her little golden-haired child is making her way along the road past Marner's cottage; she is the wife, by private marriage, of the Squire's eldest son, and after having been cruelly treated by him for years has now desperately resolved to appear with her child at a great merry-making which goes on at the Squire's to-day, there to expose all and demand justice. It so happens however that in her troubles she has become an opium-taker; just as she is passing Marner's cottage the effect of an unusually large dose becomes overpowering; she lies down and falls off into a stupor which this time ends in death. Meantime the little golden-haired girl innocently totters into the open door of Marner's cottage during his absence; presently lies down, places her head with all its golden wealth upon the very brick which Marner used to lift up in order to bring his gold to light, and so falls asleep, while a ray of sunlight strikes through the window and illuminates the little one's head. Marner now returns; he is dazed at beholding what seems almost to be another pile of gold at the familiar spot on the floor. He takes this new treasure into his hungry heart and brings up the little girl who becomes a beautiful woman and faithful daughter to him. His whole character now changes and the hardness of his previous brutal misanthropy softens into something at least approaching humanity. Now, it is fairly characteristic of George Eliot that she constantly places before us lives which change in a manner of which this is typical: that is to say, she is constantly showing us intense and hungry spirits first wasting their intensity and hunger upon that which is unworthy, often from pure ignorance of anything worthier, then finding where love is worthy, and thereafter loving larger loves, and living larger lives.
Is not this substantially the experience of Janet Dempster, of Adam Bede, replacing the love of Hetty with that of Dinah Morris; of Romola, of Dorothea, of Gwendolen Harleth?
This last name brings us directly to the work which we were specially to study to-day. George Eliot's novels have all striking relationships among themselves which cause them to fall into various groups according to various points of view. There is one point however from which her entire work divides itself into two groups, of which one includes the whole body of her writings up to 1876: the other group consists solely of Daniel Deronda. This classification is based on the fact that all the works in the first group concern the life of a time which is past. It is only in Daniel Deronda, after she has been writing for more than twenty years, that George Eliot first ventures to deal with English society of the present day. To this important claim upon our interest may be added a further circumstance which will in the sequel develop into great significance. Daniel Deronda has had the singular fate of being completely misunderstood to such a degree that the greatest admirers of George Eliot have even ventured to call it a failure, while the Philistines have rioted in abusing Gwendolen Harleth as a weak and rather disagreeable personage, Mirah and Daniel as unmitigated prigs, and the plot as an absurd attempt to awaken interest in what is called the religious patriotism of the Jews. This comparative failure of Daniel Deronda to please current criticism and even the ardent admirers of George Eliot, so clearly opens up what is to my view a singular and lamentable weakness in certain vital portions of the structure of our society that I have thought I could not render better service than by conducting our analysis of Daniel Deronda so as to make it embrace some of the most common of the objections urged against that work. Let us recall in largest possible outline the movement of Daniel Deronda. This can be done in a surprisingly brief statement. The book really concerns two people—one is Gwendolen Harleth, a beautiful English girl, brought up with all those delicate tastes and accomplishments which we understand when we think of the highest English refinement, wayward—mainly because she has seen as yet no way that seemed better to follow than her own—and ambitious, but evidently with that sacred discontent which desires the best and which will only be small when its horizon contains but small objects. The other main personage is Daniel Deronda, who has been brought up as an Englishman of rank, has a striking face and person, a natural love for all that is beautiful and noble, a good sense that enables him to see through the banalities of English political life and to shrink from involving his own existence in such littleness, and who, after some preliminary account of his youth in the earlier chapters, is placed before us early in the first book as a young man of twenty who is seriously asking himself whether life is worth living.
It so happens however that presently Gwendolen Harleth is found asking herself the same question. Tempted by a sudden reverse of fortune, by the chance to take care of her mother, and one must add by her own desire—guilty enough in such a connection—for plenty of horses to ride, and for all the other luxurious accompaniments which form so integral a portion of modern English life; driven, too, by what one must not hesitate to call the cowardliest shrinking from the name and position of a governess; conciliated by a certain infinite appearance of lordliness which in Grandcourt is mainly nothing more than a blasé brutality which has exhausted desire, Gwendolen accepts the hand of Grandcourt, quickly discovers him to be an unspeakable brute, suffers a thousand deaths from remorse and is soon found—as is just said—wringing her hands and asking if life is worth living.
Now the sole purpose and outcome of the book lie in its answers to the questions of these two young people. It does answer them, and answers them satisfactorily. On the one hand, Gwendolen Harleth, in the course of her married life, is several times thrown with Daniel Deronda; his loftiness, his straightforwardness, his fervor, his frankness, his general passion for whatsoever things are large and fine,—in a word, his goodness—form a complete revelation to her. She suddenly discovers that life is not only worth living, but that the possibility of making one's life a good life invests it with a romantic interest whose depth is infinitely beyond that of all the society-pleasures which had hitherto formed her horizon. On the other hand, Daniel Deronda discovers that he is a Jew by birth, and fired by the visions of a fervent Hebrew friend, he resolves to devote his life and the wealth that has fallen to him from various sources to the cause of reëstablishing his people in their former Eastern home. Thus also for him, instead of presenting the dreary doubt whether it is worth living, life opens up a boundless and fascinating field for energies of the loftiest kind.
Place then, clearly before your minds these two distinct strands of story. One of these might be called The Repentance of Gwendolen Harleth, and this occupies much the larger portion of the work. The other might be called The Mission of Daniel Deronda. These two strands are, as we have just seen, united into one artistic thread by the organic purpose of the book which is to furnish a fair and satisfactory answer to the common question over which these two young protagonists struggle: "Is life worth living?"
Now the painting of this repentance of Gwendolen Harleth, the development of this beautiful young aristocrat Daniel Deronda into a great and strong man consecrated to a holy purpose: all this is done with such skillful reproduction of contemporary English life, with such a wealth of flesh-and-blood character, with an art altogether so subtile, so analytic, yet so warm and so loving withal, that if I were asked for the most significant, the most tender, the most pious and altogether the most uplifting of modern books, it seems to me I should specify Daniel Deronda.
It was remarked two lectures ago that Shakspeare had never drawn a repentance; and if we consider for a single moment what is required in order to paint such a long and intricate struggle as that through which our poor, beautiful Gwendolen passed, we are helped towards a clear view of some reasons at least why this is so. For upon examining the instances of repentance alleged by those who disagree with me on this point—as mentioned in my last lecture—I find that the real difference of opinion between us is, not as to whether Shakspeare ever drew a repentance, but as to what is a repentance. There certainly are in Shakspeare pictures of regret for injuries done to loved ones under mistake or under passion, and sometimes this regret is long-drawn. But surely such reversal of feeling is only that which would be felt by any man of ordinarily manful make upon discovering that he had greatly wronged anyone, particularly a loved one. It is to this complexion that all the alleged instances of repentances in Shakspeare come at last. Nowhere do we find any special portrayal of a character engaged to its utmost depths in that complete subversion of the old by the new,—that total substitution of some higher motive for the whole existing body of emotions and desires,—that emergence out of the twilight world of selfishness into the large and sunlit plains of a love which does not turn upon self,
"Which bends not with the remover to remove"
Nor "alters when it alteration finds."
For example, Leontes, in Winter's Tale, who is cited as a chief instance of Shakspeare's repentances, quite clearly shows by word and act that his regret is mainly a sense of personal loss, not a change of character. He is sorrowful not so much because he has sinned as because he has hurt himself. In Act V. just before the catastrophe which restores him his wife and daughter, we find him exclaiming:
"Good Pauline
O that ever I
Had squared me to thy counsel! Then even now
I might have looked upon my queen's full eyes
Have taken treasure from her lips—&c.,"
And again in the same scene, where Florizel and Perdita have been brought before him, he cries:
"What might I have been,
Might I a son and daughter now have looked on
Such goodly things as you!"
In these it is clear that Leontes is speaking from personal regret; there is no thought here of that total expansion of an ego into a burning love of all other egos, implied in the term repentance, as I have used it. Similarly, King Lear, who has also been cited as an example of Shakspeare's repentances is simply an example of regret for the foulest of wrongs done in a moment of silly passion. After the poor old man, upon regaining his consciousness under Cordelia's tender ministrations, is captured together with Cordelia, in Scene III of Act V, Cordelia says, as if to comfort him:
"We are not the first
Who with best meaning have incurred the worst.
For thee, oppressed king, am I cast down.
Shall we not see these daughters and these sisters?"
Lear.—No, no, no, no! Come let's away to prison;
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage;
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness."
Here, clearly enough, is regret for his injury to Cordelia, but quite as clearly, no general state of repentance; and in the very few other words uttered by the old king before the play ends surely nothing indicating such a state appears. Of all the instances suggested only one involves anything like the process of character-change which I have called a repentance, such as Gwendolen Harleth's for example; but this one, unfortunately, is not drawn by Shakspeare: it is only mentioned as having occurred. This is the repentance of Duke Frederick in As you Like it. Just at the end of that play, when Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver, and Celia and all the rest have unraveled all their complications, and when everything that can be called plot in the play is finished, the son of old Sir Rowland appears before the company in the wood and calls out:
"Let me have audience for a word or two.
Duke Frederick hearing how that every day
Men of great worth resorted to this forest
Addressed a mighty power
purposely to take
His brother here and put him to the sword,
And to the skirts of this wild wood he came,
Where meeting with an old religious man,
After some questions with him was converted
Both from his enterprise and from the world;
His crown bequeathing to his banished brother,
And all their lands restored to them again
That were with him exiled."
Here we have indeed a true repentance, but this is all we have of it; the passage I have read contains the whole picture.
If we now go on and ask ourselves why these fascinating phenomena of repentance, which George Eliot has treated with such success, never engaged Shakspeare's energy, we come at the very first step upon a limitation of the drama as opposed to the novel which, in the strongest way, confirms the view I was at such pains to set forth in my earlier lectures of that necessity for a freer form than the dramatic, which arises from the more complete relations between modern personalities and which has really developed the novel out of the drama.
How, for instance, could Shakspeare paint the yeas and nays, the twists, the turns, the intricacies of Gwendolen Harleth's thought during the long weeks while she was debating whether she should accept Grandcourt? The whole action of this drama, you observe, is confined within the small round head of the girl herself. How could such action be brought before the audience of a play? The only hope would be in a prolonged soliloquy, for these are thoughts which no young woman would naturally communicate to any one; but what audience could stand so prolonged a soliloquy, even if any character could be found in whom it would be natural? And sometimes, too, the situation is so subtly complex that Gwendolen is soliloquizing in such a manner that we, the audience, hear her while Grandcourt, who is standing by, does not.
"I used to think archery was a great bore," Grandcourt began. He spoke with a fine accent, but with a certain broken drawl, as of a distinguished personage with a distinguished cold in his chest.
"Are you converted to-day?" said Gwendolen.
(Pause, during which she imagined various degrees and modes of opinion about herself that might be entertained by Grandcourt.)
"Yes, since I saw you shooting. In things of this sort one generally sees people missing and simpering."
"And do you care about the turf? or is that among the things you have left off?"
(Pause, during which Gwendolen thought that a man of extremely calm cold manners might be less disagreeable as a husband than other men, and not likely to interfere with his wife's preferences.)
"You would perhaps like tiger-hunting or pig-sticking. I saw some of that for a season or two in the East. Everything here is poor stuff after that."
"You are fond of danger then?"
(Pause, during which Gwendolen speculated on the probability that the men of coldest manners were the most adventurous, and felt the strength of her own insight, supposing the question had to be decided.)
"One must have something or other. But one gets used to it."
"I begin to think I am very fortunate, because everything is new to me; it is only that I can't get enough of it. I am not used to anything except being dull, which I should like to leave off as you have left off shooting."
(Pause, during which it occurred to Gwendolen that a man of cold and distinguished manners might possibly be a dull companion; but on the whole, the thought that most persons were dull, and that she had not observed husbands to be companions.)
"Why are you dull?"
"This is a dreadful neighborhood, there is nothing to be done in it. That is why I practised my archery."
(Pause, during which Gwendolen reflected that the life of an unmarried woman who could not go about and had no command of anything, must necessarily be dull through all the degrees of comparison as time went on.)
"You have made yourself queen of it. I imagine you will carry the first prize."
"I don't know that. I have great rivals. Did you not observe how well Miss Arrowpoint shot?"
(Pause, wherein Gwendolen was thinking that men had been known to choose some one else than the woman they most admired, and recalled several experiences of that kind in novels.)
At this point we come upon an element of difference between the novel and the drama which has not hitherto been fairly appreciated, so far as I know. Consider for a moment the wholly supernatural power which is necessarily involved in the project of thus showing the most secret workings of the mind and heart of this young girl Gwendolen Harleth! In real life what power less than God's can make me see the deepest thought and feeling of a fellow-creature? But since the novel is always a transcript of real, or at any rate of possible, life, you observe that wherever these workings of heart and brain are thus laid bare, the tacit supposition is, in plain terms, that God is the writer, or that the writer is a god. In the drama no supposition is necessary because here we become acquainted with only such matters as are shown us in the ordinary way, by scenery or by the speech or gesture of the actor. This consideration seems to me to lift the novel to the very highest and holiest plane of creative effort; he who takes up the pen of the novelist assumes, as to that novel, to take up along with it the omniscience of God. He proposes, in effect, to bring about the revelations of Judgment Day long before the trumpet has sounded. George Eliot shows us the play of Gwendolen Harleth's soul with the same uncompromising fulness with which the most literal believer expects to give account of the deeds done in the body at the last day.
In contemplating this vast ascent from the attitude of the dramatist to that of the novelist—the dramatist is a man; the novelist—as to that novel, is a god—we are contemplating simply another phase of the growth of man from Shakspeare to George Eliot.
And we reach still another view of that growth when we reflect that even if Shakspeare could have overcome the merely mechanical difficulty of presenting a repentance without overmuch soliloquy, he would probably have found but poorly-paying houses at the Globe Theatre to witness any drama so purely spiritual as that which George Eliot has shown us going on upon the little ill-lighted stage of a young girl's consciousness. Just as we found that the prodigious advance in the nearness of man to his fellow from the time of Æschylus to that of George Eliot was implied in the fact that the latter could gather an interested audience about a couple of commonplace children (as in The Mill on the Floss), whilst the former required the larger stimulus of Titanic quarrel and angry Jove; so here we have reached an evidence of still more subtle advance as between the times of Shakspeare and of George Eliot when we find the latter gathering a great audience about this little inward, actionless, complex drama of Gwendolen Harleth, while we reflect that Shakspeare must have his stimulant passion, his crime, his patriotism, and the like, as the only attracting motives. In truth I find what seems to be a cunning indication that George Eliot herself did not feel quite sure of her audience for this same little play. At the end of Chapter XI., she breaks off from a description of one of Gwendolen's capricious turns, and as if in apologetic defense says:
"Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread in human history than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?—in a time, too, when ideas were with fresh vigor making armies of themselves and the universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely; ... a time when the soul of man was waking to pulses which had for centuries been beating in him unheard.... What, in the midst of that mighty drama, are girls and their blind visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring or fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affections."
Thus it appears that for Shakspeare to draw such repentances as Gwendolen Harleth's was not only difficult from the playwright's point of view, but premature from the point of view of the world's growth. In truth, I suspect, if we had time to pursue this matter, that we should find it leading us into some very instructive views of certain rugged breaking-off places in Shakspeare. I suppose we must consider the limitations of his time; though it is just possible there may be limitations of his genius, also. We should presently find ourselves asking further how it is that Shakspeare not only never drew a great reformation, but never painted a great reformer? It seems a natural question: How is it, that it is Milton, and not Shakspeare, who has treated the subject of Paradise Lost and Regained; how is it, that the first-class subject was left for the second-class genius? We all know how Milton has failed in what he intended with his poem, and how astonished he would be at finding that the only one of his characters which has taken any real hold upon the world is his Satan. It seems irresistible to ask ourselves why might not our most eloquent tongue have treated our most lofty theme? Or, if we should find special reasons in the temper of his time why Shakspeare could not or should not have treated this theme, we may still ask, why did he never paint for us one of those men who seem too large to be bounded in their affections merely by limits of country, but who loved and worked for the whole world, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mahomet, Socrates, Luther; nay, why may not the master have given us a master's picture of Christopher Columbus, or even of John Vanini, the scientific martyr; even of the fantastic Giordano Bruno, who against all warnings boldly wandered from town to town defending his doctrines until he was burned, in 1600? And if any of the academicians now in my audience should incline to pursue this strange psychologic literary problem, I make no doubt that useful light would be cast upon the search if you should consider along with these questions the further inquiries why Shakspeare never mentions either of the two topics which must have been foremost in the talk of his time: namely, America and tobacco. Among all the allusions to contemporary matter in his plays the nearest he ever comes to America is the single instance in The Tempest, where Ariel is mentioned as "fetching dew from the still-vexed Bermoothes" (Bermudas). As for tobacco; although pretty much all London must have been smoking vigorously about the time Shakspeare was writing Much Ado About Nothing and The Merry Wives of Windsor; although certainly to a countryman not a great while out of the woods of Warwickshire it must have been the oddest of sights to see people sucking at hollow tubes and puffing smoke from their mouths and nostrils; although, too, the comedies of his contemporaries are often cloudy with tobacco smoke: nevertheless there is not, so far as my recollection goes, the faintest allusion to the drinking of tobacco (as it was then called), in the whole body of his writings. Now all these omissions are significant because conspicuous; always, in studying genius, we learn as much from what it has not done, as from what it has done; and if research should succeed in arranging these neglects from any common point of view, it is possible that something new might still be said about Shakspeare.
But, to return to Daniel Deronda. A day or two after George Eliot's death the Saturday Review contained an elaborate editorial summary of her work. For some special ends, permit me to read so much of it as relates to the book now under consideration. "Daniel Deronda is devoted to the whimsical object of glorifying real or imaginary Jewish aspirations. It cannot be doubted that so fantastic a form of enthusiasm was suggested by some personal predilection or association. A devotion to the Jewish cause unaccompanied by any kind of interest in the Jewish religion is not likely to command general sympathy; but even if the purpose of the story had been as useful as it is chimerical and absurd, the inherent fault of didactic fiction would scarcely have been diminished.... It is significant that when George Eliot deliberately preferred the function of teaching to her proper office of amusing she sacrificed her power of instruction as well as her creative faculty."
Of course, in general, no man in his senses thinks of taking in serious earnest every proposition in the Saturday Review. It is an odd character which long ago assumed the role of teasing English society by gravely advancing any monstrous assertions at random and laughing in its sleeve at the elaborate replies with which these assertions would be honored by weak and unsuspecting people. But its position upon this particular point of Daniel Deronda happens to be supported by similar views among her professed admirers.
Even The Spectator in its obituary notice completely mistakes the main purpose of Daniel Deronda; in declaring that "she takes religious patriotism for the subject," though as I have just indicated, surely the final aim of the book is to furnish to two young modern people a motive sufficient to make life not only worth living but fascinating; and of the two distinct plots in the book one—and the one to which most attention is paid—hinges upon Gwendolen Harleth's repentance, while it is only the other and slighter which is concerned with what these papers call religious patriotism, and here the phrase "religious patriotism" if we examine it is not only meaningless—what is religious patriotism?—but has the effect of dwarfing the two grand motives which are given to Daniel Deronda; namely religion and patriotism.
Upon bringing together, however, all the objections which have been urged against Daniel Deronda, I think they may be classified and discussed under two main heads. First it is urged that Daniel Deronda and Mirah—and even Gwendolen Harleth, after her change of spirit—are all prigs; secondly, it is urged that the moral purpose of the book has overweighted the art of it, that what should have been pure nature and beauty have been obscured by didacticism, thus raising the whole question of Art for Art's sake which has so mournfully divided the modern artistic world. This last objection, opening, as it does, the whole question of how far fervent moral purpose injures the work of the true artist, is a matter of such living importance in the present state of our art,—particularly of our literary art; it so completely sums up all these contributory items of thought which have been gradually emerging in these lectures regarding the growth of human personality together with the correlative development of the novel: and the discussions concerning it are conducted upon such small planes and from such low and confusing points of view that I will ask to devote my next lecture to a faithful endeavor to get all the light possible upon the vexed matter of Art for Art's sake, and to showing how triumphantly George Eliot's Daniel Deronda seems to settle that entire debate with the most practical of answers.
Meantime in discussing the other class of objections which we managed to generalize, to wit that the three main characters in Daniel Deronda are prigs, a serious difficulty lies in the impossibility of learning from these objectors exactly what is a prig. And I confess I should be warned off from any attempt at discussion by this initial difficulty if I did not find great light thrown on the subject by discovering that the two objections of prig-ism and that of didacticism already formulated are really founded upon the same cunning weakness in our current culture. The truth is George Eliot's book Daniel Deronda, is so sharp a sermon that it has made the whole English contemporary society uncomfortable. It is curious and instructive to see how unable all the objectors have been to put their fingers upon the exact source of this discomfort; so that in their bewilderment one lays it to prig-ism, another to didacticism, and so on. That a state of society should exist in which such a piece of corruption as Grandcourt should be not only the leader but the crazing fascination and ideal of the most delicate and fastidious young women in that society; that a state of society should exist in which those pure young girls whom George Eliot describes as "the delicate vessels in which man's affections are hoarded through the ages," should be found manœuvring for this Grandcourt infamy, plotting to be Grandcourt's wife instead of flying from him in horror; that a state of society should exist in which such a thing was possible as a marriage between a Gwendolen Harleth and a Grandcourt; this was enough to irritate even the thickest-skinned Philistine, and this George Eliot's book showed with a terrible conclusiveness. Yet the showing was made so daintily and with so light a hand that, as I have said, current society did not know, and has not yet recognized where or how the wound was. We have all read of the miraculous sword in the German fable whose blade was so keen that when, upon a certain occasion, its owner smote a warrior with it from crown to saddle, the warrior nevertheless rode home and was scarcely aware he had been wounded until, upon his wife opening the door, he attempted to embrace her and fell into two pieces. Now, as I said, just as Daniel Deronda made people feel uncomfortable by even vaguely revealing a sharp truth—so, a prig, so far as I can make out, is a person whose goodness is so genuine, essential and ever-present that all ungenuine people have a certain sense of discomfort when brought in contact with it. If the prig-hater be questioned he will not deny the real goodness of the Daniel Deronda people; he dare not—no one in this age dare—to wish explicitly that Mirah and Daniel Deronda might be less good; but as nearly as anything definite can be obtained what he desires is that the prig should be good in some oily and lubricative way so as not to jar the nerves of those who are less good. Conform, conform! seems to be the essential cry of the prig-haters; if you go to an evening party you wear your dress coat and look like every other man; but if your goodness amounts to a hump, a deformity, we do not ask you to cut it off, but at least pad it; if every one grows as big as you we shall have to enlarge all our drawing-rooms and society will be disorganized. In short, the cry against the prig turns out to be nothing more than the old claim for conformity and the conventional. For one, I never hear these admonitions to conformity without recalling a comical passage of Tom Hood's in which the fellows of a Zoological society propose to remedy the natural defects of animal morphology, such as the humps of dromedaries and the overgrowth of hair upon lions so as to bring all the grotesqueness of the animal creation into more conformity with conventional ideas of proportion. The passage occurs in a pretended report from the keeper of the animals to the President of the society. After describing the condition of the various beasts the keeper proceeds:
Honnerd Sur,—Their is an aggitating skeem of witch I humbly approve very hiley. The plan is owen to sum of the Femail Fellers,— ... For instances the Buffloo and Fallo dears and cetra to have their horns Gilded and Sheaps is to hav Pink ribbings round there nex. The Ostreaches is to have their plums stuck in their heds, and the Pecox tales will be always spred out on fraime wurks like the hispaliers. All the Bares is to be tort to Dance to Wippert's Quadrils and the Lions manes is to be subjective to pappers and the curling tongues. The gould and silver Fesants is to be Polisht every day with Plait Powder and the Cammils and Drumdearis and other defourmed anymills is to be paddid to hide their Crukidnes. Mr. Howard is to file down the tusks of the wild Bores, and the Spoons of the Spoonbills is to maid as like the King's Patten as possible. The elifunt will be himbelisht with a Sugger candid Castle maid by Gunter and the Flaminggoes will be touched up with Frentch ruge. The Sloath is proposed to have an illegant Stait Bed—and the Bever is to ware one of Perren's lite Warter Proof Hats—and the Balld Vulters baldness will be hided by a small Whig from Trewfits. The Crains will be put into trousirs and the Hippotamus tite laced for a waste. Experience will dictait menny more imbellishing modes, with witch I conclud that I am
Your Honners,
Very obleeged and humbel former servant,
Stephen Humphreys.
Such is the ideal to which the prig is asked to conform, but after the first six lectures of this course we are specially in position to see in all this cry nothing but the old clamor against personality. Upon us who have traced the growth of personality from Æschylus to George Eliot and who have found that growth to be the one direction for the advance of our species this cry comes with little impressiveness.
XII.
In the last lecture we obtained a view of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda as containing two distinct stories, one of which might have been called The Repentance of Gwendolen Harleth, and the other, The Mission of Daniel Deronda; and we generalized the principal objections against the work into two: namely, that the main characters were prigs, and that the artistic value of the book was spoiled by its moral purpose. In discussing the first of these objections we found that probably both of them might be referred to a common origin; for examination of precisely what is meant by a prig revealed that he is a person whose goodness is so downright, so unconforming and so reduced that it makes the mass of us uncomfortable. Now there can be no question that so far as the charge of being overloaded with moral purposes is brought against Daniel Deronda, as distinguished from George Eliot's other works, it is so palpably contrary to all facts in the case that we may clearly refer it to some fact outside the case: and I readily find this outside fact in that peculiar home-thrust of the moral of Daniel Deronda which has rendered it more tangible than that of any preceding work which concerned time past. You will remember we found that it was only in Daniel Deronda, written in 1876, after thirty years of study and of production, that George Eliot allowed herself to treat current English society; you will remember too, how we found that this first treatment revealed among other things a picture of an unspeakable brute, Grandcourt, throned like an Indian lama above the multitude, and receiving with a blasé stare, the special adoration of the most refined young English girls; a picture which made the worship of the golden calf or the savage dance around a merely impotent wooden idol, fade into tame blasphemy. No man could deny the truth of the picture; the galled jade was obliged to wince; this time it was my withers that were wrung. Thus the moral purpose of Daniel Deronda which is certainly beyond all comparison less obtrusive than that of any other book written by George Eliot, grew by its very nearness, out of all perspective. Though a mere gnat, it sat on the very eyelash of society and seemed a monster.
In speaking of George Eliot's earlier stories I was at pains to show how explicitly she avowed their moral purpose; in Amos Barton, in Janet's Repentance, in Adam Bede, everywhere there is the fullest avowal of didacticism; on almost every other page one meets those direct appeals from the author in her own person to the reader, in which George Eliot indulged more freely than any novelist I know, enforcing this or that moral view in plain terms of preaching. But it curiously happens that even these moral 'asides' are conspicuously absent in Daniel Deronda: the most cursory comparison of it in this particular with Adam Bede, for example, reveals an enormous disproportion in favor of Deronda as to the weight of this criticism. Yet people who had enthusiastically accepted and extolled Adam Bede, with all its explicitly moralizing passages and its professedly preaching characters, suddenly found that Daniel Deronda was intolerably priggish and didactic. But resting then on the facts in the case—easily possible by comparing Daniel Deronda with any previous work—as to show how this censure of didacticism loses all momentum as against this particular book; let us advance to the more interesting, because more general, fact that many people—some in great sincerity—have preferred this censure against all of George Eliot's work and against all didactic novels in general. The objection involved many shades of opinion, and is urged with the most diverse motives and manner. At one extreme we have the Saturday Review growling that the office of the novelist is to amuse, never to instruct, that George Eliot, in seeking the latter has even forfeited the former, and that Daniel Deronda neither amuses nor instructs; whereupon George Eliot is derisively bid, in substance, to put on the cap and bells again, and leave teaching to her betters; with a voice, by the way, wondrously like that with which the Edinburgh Review some years ago cried out to our adorable John Keats, "Back to your gallipots, young man." From this extreme we have all shades of opinion to that vague and moderate apprehension much current among young persons influenced by a certain smart sound in the modern French phrase l'Art pour l'Art, or by the German nickname of "tendency-books," that a moral intention on the part of an artist is apt to interfere with the naturalness or intrinsic beauty of his work; that in art the controlling consideration must always be artistic beauty; and that artistic beauty is not only distinct from, but often opposed to moral beauty. Now, to discuss this question a priori: to go forward and establish an æsthetic basis for beauty, involving an examination which must range from Aristotle to Kant and Burke and Mr. Grant Allen's physiological theories, would require another course of lectures quite as long as that which is now ending; so that all I can hope to do is but to throw, if I can, some light upon this question. And, so to proceed immediately to that work with some system: permit me to recall to you in the first place that the requirement has been from time immemorial that wherever there is contest as between artistic and moral beauty, unless the moral side prevail, all is lost. Let any sculptor hew us out the most ravishing combination of tender curves and spheric softness that ever stood for woman; yet if the lip have a certain fulness that hints of the flesh, if the brow be insincere, if in the minutest particular the physical beauty suggest a moral ugliness, that sculptor—unless he be portraying a moral ugliness for a moral purpose—may as well give over his marble for paving-stones. Time, whose judgments are inexorably moral, will not accept his work. For indeed we may say that he who has not yet perceived how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines which run back into a common ideal origin, and who therefore is not afire with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty—that he, in short, who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing, burn as one fire, shine as one light, within him;—he is not yet the great artist. Here it is most instructive to note how fine and beautiful souls of time appear after awhile to lose all sense of distinction between these terms, Beauty, Truth, Love, Wisdom, Goodness, and the like. Hear some testimony upon this point: this is a case for witnesses. Let us call first Keats. Keats does not hesitate to draw a moral even from his Grecian Urn, and even in the very climacteric of his most "high sorrowful" song; and that moral effaces the distinction between truth and beauty. "Cold pastoral" he cries, at the end of the Ode on a Grecian Urn.
"When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man to whom thou say'st
Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Again, bearing in mind this identity of truth and beauty in Keats' view, observe how Emerson, by strange turns of thought, subtly refers both truth and beauty to a common principle of the essential relation of each thing to all things in the universe. Here are the beginning and end of Emerson's poem called Each and All:
"Little thinks in the field yon red-cloaked clown
Of thee from the hill-top looking down;
The sexton tolling his bell at noon
Deems not that great Napoleon
Stops his horse and lists with delight
While his files sweep 'round Alpine height;
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one;
Nothing is fair or good alone."
Nothing is fair or good alone: that is to say fairness or beauty, and goodness depend upon relations between creatures; and so, in the end of the poem, after telling us how he learned this lesson by finding that the bird-song was not beautiful when away from its proper relation to the sky and the river and so on, we have this:—
"Then I said 'I covet truth;
Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;
I leave it behind with the games of youth,'
As I spoke, beneath my feet
The ground-pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burs;
I inhaled the violet's breath;
Around me stood the oaks and firs;
Pine cones and acorns lay on the ground;
Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;
Again I saw, again I heard
The rolling river, the morning bird;
Beauty through my senses stole,
I yielded myself to the perfect whole."
But again, here Mrs. Browning, speaking by the mouth of Adam in The Drama of Exile, so far identifies beauty and love as to make the former depend on the latter; insomuch that Satan, created the most beautiful of all angels, becomes the most repulsive of all angels from lack of love, though retaining all his original outfit of beauty. In The Drama of Exile, after Adam and Eve have become wise with the great lessons of grief, love and forgiveness, to them comes Satan, with such talk as if he would mock them back into their misery; but it is fine to see how the father of men now instructs the prince of the angels upon this matter of love and beauty.
Eve.—Speak no more with him,
Beloved! it is not good to speak with him.
Go from us, Lucifer, and speak no more!
We have no pardon which thou dost not scorn,
Nor any bliss, thou seest, for coveting,
Nor innocence for staining. Being bereft,
We would be alone. Go.
Luc.—Ah! ye talk the same,
All of you—spirits and clay—go, and depart!
In Heaven they said so; and at Eden's gate,—
And here, reiterant, in the wilderness.
None saith, stay with me, for thy face is fair!
None saith, stay with me, for thy voice is sweet!
And yet I was not fashioned out of clay.
Look on me, woman! Am I beautiful?
Eve.—Thou hast a glorious darkness.
Eve.—I think, no more.
Luc.—False Heart—thou thinkest more!
Thou canst not choose but think it, that I stand
Most absolute in beauty. As yourselves
Were fashioned very good at best, so we
Sprang very beauteous from the creant Word
Which thrilled behind us, God Himself being moved
When that august mark of a perfect shape,—
His dignities of sovran angel-hood,—
Swept out into the universe,—divine
With thunderous movements, earnest looks of gods,
And silver-solemn clash of cymbal-wings!
Whereof was I, in motion, and in form,
A part not poorest. And yet,—yet, perhaps,
This beauty which I speak of is not here,
As God's voice is not here, nor even my crown
I do not know. What is this thought or thing
Which I call beauty? is it thought or thing?
Is it a thought accepted for a thing?
Or both? or neither?—a pretext—a word?
Its meaning flutters in me like a flame
Under my own breath: my perceptions reel
For evermore around it, and fall off,
As if, it, too, were holy.
Eve.—Which it is.
Adam.—The essence of all beauty, I call love.
The attribute, the evidence, the end,
The consummation to the inward sense,
Of beauty apprehended from without,
I still call love. As form, when colorless,
Is nothing to the eye,—that pine-tree there,
Without its black and green, being all a blank,—
So, without love, is beauty undiscerned,
In man or angel. Angel! rather ask
What love is in thee, what love moves to thee,
And what collateral love moves on with thee;
Then shalt thou know if thou art beautiful.
Luc.—Love! what is love? I lose it. Beauty and love
I darken to the image. Beauty—love!
Let us now carry forward this connection between love and beauty in listening to a further testimony of Emerson's in a poem called The Celestial Love, where, instead of identifying beauty and truth with Keats, we find him making love and truth to be one.
"Love's hearts are faithful, but not fond,
Bound for the just but not beyond;
Not glad, as the low-loving herd,
Of self in other still preferred
But they have heartily designed
The benefit of broad mankind
And they serve men austerely,
After their own genius, clearly.
Without a false humility;
For this is love's nobility,—
Not to scatter bread and gold,
Goods and raiment bought and sold;
But to hold fast his simple sense,
And speak the speech of innocence,
And with hand, and body, and blood,
To make his bosom-counsel good.
For he that feeds men serveth few;
He serves all that dares be true."
And in connection with these lines:—
"Not glad, as the low-loving herd,
Of self in other still preferred,"
I must here beg you to observe the quite incalculable advance in the ideal of love here presented by Emerson, and the ideal which was thought to be the crown and boast of the classic novel a hundred years ago, and which is still pointed to with exultation by thoughtless people. This ideal, by universal voice was held to have been consummated by Fielding in his character of Squire Allworthy, in the famous novel, Tom Jones. And here it is: we have a dramatic presentation of Squire Allworthy early on a May morning, pacing the terrace before his mansion which commanded a noble stretch of country, and then Fielding glows thus: "In the full blaze of his majesty up rose the sun, than which one object alone in this lower creation could be more glorious, and that Mr. Allworthy himself presented—a human being replete with benevolence, meditating in what manner he might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to his creatures." Here Mr. Allworthy's benevolence has for its object to render himself most acceptable to his Creator; his love, in other words, is only another term for increasing his account in the Bank of Heaven; a perfect example, in short, of that love of the low-loving herd which is self in other still preferred.
But now let me once more turn the tube and gain another radiant arrangement of these kaleidoscopic elements, beauty and love and the like. In Emerson's poem called "Beauty," which must be distinguished from the "Ode to Beauty," the relation between love and beauty takes this turn: "Seyd," he says, "chased beauty
"Everywhere,
In flame, in storm, in clouds of air.
He smote the lake to feed his eye
With the beryl beam of the broken wave;
He flung in pebbles well to hear
The moment's music which they gave.
Oft pealed for him a lofty tone
From nodding pole and belting zone.
He heard a voice none else could hear
From centred and from errant sphere.
The quaking earth did quake in rhyme,
Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime,
In dens of passion, pits of woe,
He saw strong Eros struggling through,
To sum the doubt and solve the curse
And beam to the bounds of the universe.
While thus to love he gave his days
In loyal worship, scorning praise,"
(where, you observe, love is substituted for beauty, as that to which he gave his days, in the most naive assumption that the one involved the other.)
"While thus to love he gave his days
In loyal worship, scorning praise,
How spread their lures for him in vain
Thieving ambition and paltering gain!
He thought it happier to be dead,
To die for Beauty,—than live for bread."
George Eliot has somewhere called this word love a word-of-all-work. If with another turn I add to these testimonies one from Swedenborg, in which this same love—which we have just seen to be beauty—which beauty we just before saw to be truth—is now identified with wisdom: we prove the justice of George Eliot's phrase. In Section X of his work on the Divine Providence Swedenborg says: "The good of love is not good any further than it is united to the truth of wisdom; and the truth of wisdom is not truth any further than it is united to the good of love;" and he continues in section XIII: "Now because truth is from good, as wisdom is from love, therefore both taken together are called love or good; for love in its form is wisdom, and good in its form is truth."
And finally does not David practically confirm this view where, in Psalm CXIX. he involves the love of the law of God with wisdom in the verse: "I understand more than the ancients because I keep thy precepts?"
But I grieve that there is no time to call more witnesses; for I love to assemble these lofty spirits and hear them speak upon one topic. Is it not clear that in the minds of these serious thinkers truth, beauty, wisdom, goodness, love, appear as if they were but orators of one and the same essential God?
And if this be true cannot one say with authority to the young artist,—whether working in stone, in color, in tones or in character-forms of the novel: so far from dreading that your moral purpose will interfere with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction that unless you are suffused—soul and body, one might say—with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in love—that is, the love of all things in their proper relation—unless you are suffused with this love do not dare to meddle with beauty, unless you are suffused with beauty, do not dare to meddle with love, unless you are suffused with truth, do not dare to meddle with goodness,—in a word, unless you are suffused with beauty, truth, wisdom, goodness and love, abandon the hope that the ages will accept you as an artist.
Of course I leave out of view here all that field of artistic activity which is merely neutral, which is—not immoral but—merely unmoral. The situations in Scott's novels for instance do not in general put us upon any moral question as between man and man. Or when our own Mr. Way paints his luminous bunches of grapes, one of which will feed the palates of a thousand souls though it is never eaten, and thus shows us how Art repeats the miracle of the loaves and fishes, feeding the multitude and leaving more of the original provision than was at first; we have most delightful unmoral art. This is not only legitimate, but I think among the most beneficent energies of art; it rests our hearts, it gives us holiday from the Eternal Debate, it re-creates us for all work.
But now secondly, as to the influence of moral purpose in art: we have been in the habit, as you will remember, of passing at the earliest possible moment from abstract discussion to the concrete instance; and if we now follow that course and inquire,—not whether moral purpose may interfere with artistic creation,—but whether moral purpose has interfered with artistic creation, as matter of fact, in the works of those whom the ages have set in the highest heaven of art, we get a verdict which seems to leave little room for question. At the beginning we are met with the fact that the greatest work has always gone hand in hand with the most fervent moral purpose. For example, the most poetical poetry of which we know anything is that of the author of Job, and of David and his fellow psalm-writers. I have used the expression "most poetical" here with design; for regarded as pure literature these poems in this particular of poeticalness, of pure spirituality, lift themselves into a plane not reached by any others. A single fact in proof of this exceeding poeticalness will suffice: it is the fact that these poems alone, of all ever written, bear translation from one language into another without hurt. Surely this can be said of no other poetic work. If we strike away all allowances of amateurishness and good fellowship and judge with the uncompromising truth of the pious artist; how pitiful is Homer as he appears in even Pope's English; or how subtly does the simplicity of Dante sink into childishness even with Mr. Longfellow interpreting; or how tedious and flat fall the cultured sentences of Goethe even in Taylor's version, which has by many been declared the most successful translation ever made, not only of Faust but of any foreign poem; nay, how completely the charm of Chaucer exhales away even when redacted merely from an older dialect into a later one, by hands so skillful as those of Dryden and Wordsworth.
Now, it is words and their associations which are untranslatable, not ideas; there is no idea, whether originating in a Hebrew, Greek or other mind, which cannot be adequately produced as idea in English words; the reason why Shakspeare and Dante are practically untranslatable is that recognizing how every word means more than itself to its native users,—how every word is like the bright head of a comet drawing behind it a less luminous train of vague associations which are associations only to those who have used such words from infancy,—Shakspeare and Dante, I say, have used this fact, and have constructed poems which necessarily mean more to native hearers than they can possibly mean to any foreign ear.
But this Hebrew poetry which I have mentioned is so purely composed of ideas which are universal, essential, fundamental to the personality of man, instantly recognizable by every soul of every race,—that they remain absolutely great, absolutely artistic, in whatever language they are couched.
For example: if one climbs up for a moment out of that vagueness with which Biblical expressions, for various reasons, are apt to fall upon many ears, so that one may consider the clean and virgin quality of ideas clarified from all factitious charm of word and of association,—what could be more nearly perfect as pure literature than this:
"The entrance of Thy words giveth light;
it giveth understanding unto the simple.
I opened my mouth and panted;
for I longed for Thy commandments.
Deliver me from the oppression of man:
so will I keep Thy precepts.
Order my steps in Thy word,
and let not any iniquity have dominion over me.
Make Thy face to shine upon Thy servant;
and teach me Thy statutes.
Rivers of waters run down my eyes
because they kept not Thy law."
Or this:
"I will lift up mine eyes to the hills
whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the Lord
which made heaven and earth.
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade
upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil:
He shall preserve thy soul.
The Lord shall preserve thy going out
and thy coming in from this time forth
even for evermore."
Or this, of Isaiah's:
"Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped.
Then the lame shall leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.
In the habitations of dragons where each lay shall be grass with reeds and rushes.... No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there;
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with songs of everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away."
Or this, from the author of Job:
"Surely there is a vein for the silver and a place for gold where they fine it....
As for the earth, out of it cometh bread: and under it is turned up as it were fire.
But where shall wisdom be found?
And where is the place of understanding?
... The depth saith, it is not in me: and the sea saith, it is not with me.
... Destruction and death say, we have heard the fame thereof with our ears; God understandeth the ways thereof and he knoweth the place thereof. For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven;
... When He made a decree for the rain and a way for the lightning of the thunder:
Then did He see it and declare it;
He prepared it, yea, and searched it out.
And unto man He said: "Behold the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding."
Here it is apparent enough that the moral purpose with which these writers were beyond all question surcharged, instead of interfering with the artistic value of their product, has spiritualized the art of it into an intensity which burns away all limitations of language and sets their poems as indestructible monuments in the hearts of the whole human race.
If we descend to the next rank of poetry I have only to ask you to observe how, in Shakspeare, just as the moral purpose becomes loftier the artistic creations become lovelier. Compare, for example, the forgiveness and reconciliation group of plays as they have been called, Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, and The Tempest, (which must have been written late in Shakspeare's life when the moral beauty of large forgiveness seems to have taken full possession of his fancy, and when the moral purpose of displaying that beauty to his fellow-men seemed to have reigned over his creative energy): compare, I say, these plays with earlier ones, and it seems to me that all the main creations are more distinctly artistic, more spiritually beautiful, lifted up into a plane of holy ravishment which is far above that of all the earlier plays. Think of the dignity and endless womanly patience of Hermione, of the heavenly freshness and morning quality of Perdita, of the captivating roguery of Autolycus, in Winter's Tale; of the colossal forgiveness of Queen Katherine in Henry VIII, of the equally colossal pardon of Prospero, of the dewy innocence of Miranda, of the gracious and graceful ministrations of Ariel, of the grotesqueries of Caliban and Trinculo, of the play of ever-fresh delights and surprises which make the drama of The Tempest a lone and music-haunted island among dramas! Everywhere in these latter plays I seem to feel the brooding of a certain sanctity which breathes out of the larger moral purpose of the period.
Leaving these illustrations, for which time fails, it seems to me that we have fairly made out our case against these objections if, after this review of the connection between moral purpose and artistic creation we advance thirdly to the fact—of which these objectors seem profoundly oblivious—that the English novel at its very beginning announces itself as the vehicle of moral purposes. You will remember that when discussing Richardson and Fielding, the first English novelists, I was at pains to show how carefully they sheltered their works behind the claim of this very didacticism. Everywhere in Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, Tom Jones, in the preface, sometimes in the very title-page, it is ostentatiously set up that the object of the book is to improve men's moral condition by setting before them plain examples of vice and virtue.
Passing by, therefore, the absurdity of the statement that the proper office of the novelist is to amuse, and that when George Eliot pretended to do more, and to instruct, she necessarily failed to do either; it is almost as odd to find that the very objectors who urge the injurious effect of George Eliot's moral purpose upon her work are people who swear by Richardson and Fielding, utterly forgetting that if moral purpose is a detriment to Daniel Deronda, it is simply destruction to Clarissa Harlowe and Tom Jones.
And lastly upon this point, when I think of the crude and hasty criticism which confines this moral purpose in Daniel Deronda to the pushing forward of Deronda's so-called religious patriotism in endeavoring to re-establish his people in the ancient seat of the Hebrews,—a view which I call crude and hasty because it completely loses sight of the much more prominent and important moral purpose of the book, namely, the setting forth of Gwendolen Harleth's repentance; when, I say, I hear these critics not only assume that Deronda's mission is the moral purpose of this book, but even belittle that by declaring that George Eliot's enthusiasm for the rehabilitation of the Jews must have been due to a chance personal acquaintance of hers with some fervid Jew who led her off into these chimerical fancies; and when, I find this tone prevailing not only with the Philistines, but among a great part of George Eliot's otherwise friends and lovers: then I am in a state of amazement which precludes anything like critical judgment on my part. As for me, no Jew—not even the poorest shambling clothes-dealer in Harrison street—but startles me effectually out of this work-a-day world: when I look upon the face of a Jew, I seem to receive a message which has come under the whole sea of time from the further shore of it: this wandering person, who without a home in any nation has yet made a literature which is at home in every nation, carries me in one direction to my mysterious brethren, the cavemen and the lake dwellers, in the other direction to the carpenter of Bethlehem, climax of our race. And now, to gather together these people from the four ends of the earth, to rehabilitate them in their thousand-fold consecrated home after so many ages of wandering, to re-make them into a homologous nation at once the newest and the oldest upon the earth, to endow the 19th Century with that prodigious momentum which all the old Jewish fervor and spirituality and tenacity would acquire in the backward spring from such long ages of restraint and oppression, and with the mighty accumulation of cosmopolitan experiences; the bare suggestion would seem enough to stir the blood of the most ungentle Gentile.
But I must hasten to complete the account of George Eliot's personal existence which we suspended at the point where she had come to London in 1851.
She had been persuaded to this step by Dr. Chapman, who was at that time editor of the Westminster Review, and who asked her to come and help him to conduct that publication. At this time she must have been one of the most captivating companions imaginable. She knew French, German and Italian, and had besides a good knowledge of Latin, Greek, Russian and Hebrew. She was a really good player of the piano, and had some proficiency on the organ; she had already mixed in some of the best society of London, for, in 1841, her father had moved to Foleshill, near Coventry, and here she quickly became intimate in the household of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray, where she met such people as Emerson, George Combe, Mr. Froude, and many other noted ones of the literary circles which the Brays delighted in drawing about them; her mind had been enlarged by the treasures of the Continent which she visited with her life-long friends, the Brays, in 1849, after the death of her father, remaining at Geneva after the Brays returned to England; she had all that homely love which comes with the successful administration of breakfast, dinner and supper, for her sisters and brothers had all married, and she lived alone with her father after his removal to Coventry in 1841, and kept his house for him from that time until his death, not only with great daughterly devotion but, it is said, with great success as a domestic manager; besides thus knowing the mysteries of good coffee and good bread she was widely versed in theology, philosophy and the movements of modern science: all of which equipment was permeated with a certain intensity which struck every one who came near her. With this endowment she came to London in 1851, as I have said, by Dr. Chapman's invitation, and took up her residence at Dr. Chapman's house. Here she immediately began to meet George H. Lewes, Carlyle, Mill and Herbert Spencer. Of her relations to Lewes it seems to me discussion is not now possible. It is known that Lewes' wife had once left him, that he had generously condoned the offense and received her again, and that in a year she again eloped; the laws of England make such a condonation preclude divorce; Lewes was thus prevented from legally marrying again by a technicality of the law which converted his own generosity into a penalty; under these circumstances George Eliot, moved surely by pure love, took up her residence with him, and according to universal account, not only was a faithful wife to him for twenty years until his death, but was a devoted mother to his children. That her failure to go through the form of marriage was not due to any contempt for that form, as has sometimes been absurdly alleged, is conclusively shown by the fact that when she married Mr. Cross, a year and a half after Lewes' death, the ceremony was performed according to the regular rites of the Church of England.
The most congenial of George Eliot's acquaintances during these early days at the Chapman's in London was Mr. Herbert Spencer. For a long time indeed the story went the rounds that Mr. Spencer had been George Eliot's tutor; but you easily observe that when she met him at this time in London she was already thirty-one years old, long past her days of tutorship. The story however has authoritatively been denied by Mr. Spencer himself. That George Eliot took pleasure in his philosophy, that she was especially conversant with his Principles of Psychology, and that they were mutually-admiring and mutually-profitable friends, seems clear enough; but I cannot help regarding it a serious mistake to suppose that her novels were largely determined by Mr. Spencer's theory of evolution, as I find asserted by a recent critic who ends an article with the declaration that "the writings of George Eliot must be regarded, I think, as one of the earliest triumphs of the Spencerian method of studying personal character and the laws of social life."
This seems to me so far from being true that many of George Eliot's characters appear like living objections to the theory of evolution. How could you, according to this theory, evolve the moral stoutness and sobriety of Adam Bede, for example, from his precedent conditions, to wit, his drunken father and querulous mother? How could you evolve the intensity and intellectual alertness of Maggie Tulliver from her precedent conditions, to wit, a flaccid mother, and a father wooden by nature and sodden by misfortune? Though surely influenced by circumstances her characters everywhere seem to flout evolution in the face.
But the most pleasant feature connected with the intercourse of George Eliot and Herbert Spencer is that it appears to have been Mr. Spencer who first influenced her to write novels instead of heavy essays in The Westminster. It is most instructive to note that this was done with much difficulty. Only after long resistance, after careful thought, and indeed after actual trial was George Eliot persuaded that her gift lay in fiction and not in philosophy; for it was pending the argument about the matter that she quietly wrote Scenes from Clerical Life and caused them to be published with all the precaution of anonymousness, by way of actual test.
As to her personal habits I have gleaned that her manuscript was wonderfully beautiful and perfect, a delight to the printers, without blot or erasure, every letter carefully formed; that she read the Bible every day and that one of her favorite books was Thomas à Kempis on The Imitation of Christ; that she took no knowledge at secondhand; that she had a great grasp of business, that she worked slowly and with infinite pains, meditating long over her subject before beginning; that she was intensely sensitive to criticism; that she believed herself a poet in opposition to the almost unanimous verdict of criticism which had pronounced The Spanish Gypsy, Agatha and The Legend of Jubal as failing in the gift of song, though highly poetic; that the very best society in London—that is to say in the world—was to be found at her Sunday afternoon receptions at the Priory, Regent's Park, where she and Mr. Lewes lived so long; and that she rarely left her own home except when tempted by a fine painting or some unusually good performance of music.
I have given here a list of complete works, with dates of publication, as far as I have been able to gather. I believe this is nearly complete.
Translation of Strauss' Leben Jesu, 1846; contributions to Westminster Review, from about 1850, during several years; translation of Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, 1854; Scenes of Clerical Life, Blackwood's Magazine, 1857,—book-form 1858; Adam Bede, 1859; The Mill on the Floss, 1860; The Lifted Veil, Blackwood's Magazine, 1860; Silas Marner, 1861; Romola, Cornhill Magazine, book-form, 1863; Felix Holt, 1866; The Spanish Gypsy, 1868: Address to Workmen, Blackwood's Magazine, 1868; Agatha, 1869; How Lisa loved the king, Blackwood's Magazine, 1869; Middlemarch, 1871; The Legend of Jubal, 1874; Daniel Deronda, 1876; The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879; and said to have left a translation of Spinoza's Ethics, not yet published.
As the mind runs along these brief phrases in which I have with a purposed brevity endeavored to flash the whole woman before you, and as you supplement that view with this rapid summary of her literary product,—the details of fact seem to bring out the extraordinary nature of this woman's endowment in such a way that to add any general eulogium would be necessarily to weaken the picture. There is but one fact remaining so strong and high as not to be liable to this objection, which seems to me so characteristic that I cannot do better than close this study with it. During all her later life the central and organic idea which gave unity to her existence was a burning love for her fellow-men. I have somewhere seen that in conversation she once said to a friend: "What I look to is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and as irresistible as that which I feel to grasp something firm if I am falling," and the narrator of this speech adds that at the end of it she grasped the mantel-piece as if actually saving herself from a fall, with an intensity which made the gesture most eloquent.
You will observe that of the two commandments in which the Master summed up all duty and happiness—namely, to love the Lord with all our heart, and to love our neighbor as ourself, George Eliot's whole life and work were devoted to the exposition of the latter. She has been blamed for devoting so little attention to the former; as for me, I am too heartily grateful for the stimulus of human love which radiates from all her works to feel any sense of lack or regret. This, after all—the general stimulus along the line of one's whole nature—is the only true benefit of contact with the great. More than this is hurtful. Now a days, you do not want an author to tell you how many times a day to pray, to prescribe how many inches wide shall be the hem of your garment. This the Master never did; too well He knew the growth of personality which would settle these matters, each for itself; too well He knew the subtle hurt of all such violations of modern individualism; and after our many glimpses of the heartiness with which George Eliot recognized the fact and function of human personality one may easily expect that she never attempted to teach the world with a rule and square, but desired only to embody in living forms those prodigious generalizations in which the Master's philosophy, considered purely as a philosophy, surely excelled all other systems.
In fine, if I try to sum up the whole work of this great and beautiful spirit which has just left us in the light of all the various views I have presented in these lectures, where we have been tracing the growth of human personality from Æschylus, through Plato, Socrates, the contemporary Greek mind, through the Renaissance, Shakspeare, Richardson and Fielding, down to Dickens, and our author, I find all the numerous threads of thought which have been put before you gathered into one, if I say that George Eliot shows man what he may be, in terms of what he is.