On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

GEORGE ELIOT

The accounts of George Eliot’s earlier life, which are in general circulation, are in some respects imaginary. ‘George Eliot’—Mary Ann Evans—was not the daughter of a poor clergyman, nor was she ever ‘adopted’ by a wealthy one. She was the daughter of a land surveyor in the Midland Counties, and was brought up at her father’s home, her mother dying when Mary Ann Evans was still a child. Nor was she ever the ‘pupil’ of Mr. Herbert Spencer, nor a frequent writer in the Westminster Review. She made the acquaintance and the friendship of Mr. Spencer when she was a woman, and already the mistress of the abstruse subjects in which she then chiefly delighted. She was for a time joint-editor of the Westminster with Dr. Chapman; but her writings in that Review were neither numerous nor generally important. After a residence of some years in Coventry—where she learned profoundly the features of the ‘Midlands,’ which she afterwards described—Mary Ann Evans came to London. At twenty-six years old she translated Strauss’s Life of Jesus, and seven years later, Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity; but her efforts at creative writing were wisely delayed. Her apprenticeship to Literature and Philosophy was elaborate and laborious; her training was extensive and deep. It was not until 1858 that Scenes of Clerical Life betrayed the presence of a new artist in Fiction—an artist of fresh gifts, but of undeveloped art.

The narratives of the ‘Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,’ of ‘Janet’s Repentance,’ and of ‘Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story’—the Scenes of Clerical Life, in other words—impressed certain readers, and deserved to impress them; but not even the pathos of Mrs. Barton’s death would have given the writer lasting reputation had the book continued to stand alone. On re-perusal, the imperfections of its mechanism are too apparent; the novelist had not learned the art of proportion, nor the art of selection and rejection. Some little books, no bigger than the Scenes of Clerical Life, have been enough to secure for their authors an enduring fame. Nothing more than the Vicar of Wakefield could have been required to keep Goldsmith’s memory green. Sterne, desiring to be immortal, was under no obligation to write anything more, after he had written the Sentimental Journey. But the Scenes of Clerical Life, admirably fresh and spontaneous as they were, gave no such position to their author. It was not a young woman, but it was a woman young in her art, who was at work in them.

With Adam Bede it was otherwise. Adam Bede, published about the beginning of 1859, was seen at once to be more than a touching, and more than a popular, story. It was an achievement of complete art, and had the power of complete art, ‘to teach a truth obliquely,’ nor ‘wrong the thought’—as Mr. Browning has subtly put it—‘nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.’ It was at bottom a work of noble teaching. In it the novelist described with fidelity, but with poetic fidelity, scenes and characters the like of which she thoroughly knew; and the world recognised both the truth and the charm of the portrayal, and if it did not take to the young Squire, it took about equally to the two most strongly contrasted heroines that ever figured in one volume—to the preaching woman, Dinah Morris, with her exalted and patient spirit, and to the giddy Hetty, who had no virtue but the virtue of fascination.

It was chiefly to provincial society, or to the humbler society of the country-side, that George Eliot kept in her earlier works; and it was there that she was ever best. The elaborate Dutch painting of Silas Marner dealt sympathetically with the religious life of obscure sects; The Mill on the Floss portrayed the humours of the lower middle class, and gave us a delightful study of the passionate and lovable ‘Maggie’; Felix Holt dealt with country politics, though its best interest lay in the development of three wonderful characters—the agreeable Esther, the perplexed Felix, and the Dissenting minister who, in that old-world corner of England where the scene lay, had even in our own generation the dignity and quietude of an ancient Puritan emigrating beyond seas. Immense and always tender study of actual life was evident in these novels; and yet it did not require the publication of such a tour de force as Romola, which, in 1863, followed The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, to prove that the only novelist of quite the first rank who had arisen since Dickens and Thackeray was most powerful in work inspired by meditation and learning, rather than by observation, and that in that respect, as of course in many others, she differed absolutely from Dickens, whose strength lay in the observation of humanity, and from Thackeray, whose strength lay in the observation of ‘good society.’ If some works of George Eliot’s, of later date than Romola, remind us too often that their author, like the character in Faust, had schrecklich viel gelesen—that George Eliot was burdened with her learning—Romola is a conspicuous example of the ‘talent that forms itself,’ not exactly ‘in solitude,’ yet by profound and continuous meditation. Like all the greater works of its writer, it is a study of the heart. And in Romola the subtle wit of Italy is displayed, with curious variety of power, by a writer who had shown herself mistress, long before, of the blunter English humour.

But such a success as that of Romola—the success of an historical novelist for whom history is alive and is not a mere tradition, mere decorative background—is hardly to be made more than once. Romola may live at least as long as Esmond—in Esmond the tour de force is, if anything, more apparent; the machinery creaks sometimes yet more audibly in the working. In any case George Eliot did wisely to bring her imagination back to England, and to the shires ‘which we the heart of England well may call,’ and, having given us Felix Holt, to give us Middlemarch. Middlemarch, perhaps, has two faults as a work of art, but they are faults which evidence, at all events, the range of its writer’s mind. It is not properly one story, but several stories. The desire to put forth in a single colossal work—and Middlemarch is of the length of two three-volume novels—a picture of the whole of provincial life, touched at points, and disturbed, by the problems of our time, resulted in the creation of a book in which the many threads of narrative were often but slightly blended. Middlemarch is not a cabinet picture; it is a vast panorama. Again, in Middlemarch there was visible, for the first time in George Eliot’s career, some relaxation—or worse than relaxation—of literary style. Though on the whole it is justly allowed to be a noble piece of English writing, it is in expression less lucid and felicitous than the earlier novels; and the germs of a style charged too much with scientific similes are found to be of increased growth in Daniel Deronda. In George Eliot’s earliest fiction, though it was written in mature years, her art was not developed. In her latest, it was not concealed.

But between the two—between the Scenes of Clerical Life and Daniel Deronda—there lie some half-dozen romances, prolix, indeed, and dull at times, yet in some ways almost perfect in the most serious order of literary work. And, moreover, the presence of sheer mental power, the power chiefly of analysis and of synthesis, is almost as evident in Daniel Deronda as in the better fictions. The study of modern Jewish life and character in that formidable novel was of such a nature as to lead a leader of Jewish Society to pay a tribute to its knowledge and its sympathy. That study was directed, not only by insight, but by a continuous desire to do justice to the subject selected—to the minds chosen for dissection. The wide and deep interest in the fortunes of humanity, which characterised George Eliot, and which increased with her learning and her years—as her art somewhat declined—can never have been more apparent than in Daniel Deronda. The interest was sometimes, it is true, evidenced by way of an exalted pity; and seeing how removed that pity seemed from all that aroused it, the saying was remembered by certain critics that pity is akin to contempt. Those critics had understood George Eliot but superficially. All through her later works—and not in Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch alone—there is visible an increasing personal sense of the inevitableness of mistake, of a ‘waste of force’ in human life; and that gave to the labour of even this bright intellect a sadness which was scarcely bitterness at all.

George Eliot, during many years, was occasionally busy with what is formally poetry—informally, of course, much of her best prose was poetry, and poetry of a higher order. In some of her verse—in Jubal and the Spanish Gypsy—she touched on the careers and characters of people whom she would hardly have brought into her novels, and in one or other of her poems she expressed with a fulness and intensity not found in her prose fiction that love of music and that sympathy with the aspirations of the musical artist which she shared with the great writer of Abt Vogler. The docile public received her poems with at least sufficient appreciation—a part of which may fairly be set down to the remembrance of those triumphs as a novelist which, for the time, she had laid aside. But her poems were, in the main, like Raphael’s departure from the art of his more constant practice—like the sonnets of Michael Angelo—the evidences of an artist’s aspiration towards a field of success which shall have the charm of what is new and unfamiliar. They were that, and hardly more. It is, of course, on the romances of George Eliot that her fame will rest, and on them not because of any reflection they present of the manners of our time—these, in truth, they left to other novelists—but because of the earnestness and profundity of their dealing with problems of the age, and problems of our nature. A future generation may find, and, indeed, not a few judges, most worthy to be listened to, declare already, that much of her sad philosophy is itself a mistake as great as any which her genius discovered in the world she lived in. But if George Eliot’s analysis of life betrays some deeply rooted faults, it will at least always be admitted that it was that of a grave and gifted inquirer. If the work which began with the Scenes of Clerical Life, and ended, not auspiciously, with Theophrastus Such, has great deficiencies, it was wrought, at all events, by a serious artist, a free and wonderful spirit.

(Standard, 24th December 1880.)