It is hard to say why I rate "Middlemarch" so high. There was a touch of failure in the two preceding books, in "Felix Holt," and even in "Romola." And it was "Middlemarch" that revealed to me not only her grand serenity, but her superiority to some of the greatest writers. My life is spent in endless striving to make out the inner point of view, the raison d'être, the secret of fascination for powerful minds, of systems of religion and philosophy, and of politics, the offspring of the others, and one finds that the deepest historians know how to display their origin and their defects, but do not know how to think or to feel as men do who live in the grasp of the various systems. And if they sometimes do, it is from a sort of sympathy with the one or the other, which creates partiality and exclusiveness and antipathies. Poets are no better. Hugo, who tries so hard to do justice to the Bishop and the Conventionnel, to the nuns and the Jacobinical priest, fails from want of contact with the royalist nobleman and the revolutionary triumvirate, as Shakespeare fails ignobly with the Roman Plebs. George Eliot seemed to me capable not only of reading the diverse hearts of men, but of creeping into their skin, watching the world through their eyes, feeling their latent background of conviction, discerning theory and habit, influences of thought and knowledge, of life and of descent, and having obtained this experience, recovering her independence, stripping off the borrowed shell, and exposing scientifically and indifferently the soul of a Vestal, a Crusader, an Anabaptist, an Inquisitor, a Dervish, a Nihilist, or a Cavalier without attraction, preference, or caricature. And each of them should say that she displayed him in his strength, that she gave rational form to motives he had imperfectly analysed, that she laid bare features in his character he had never realised.
I heard the close of Friday's debate, and was much distressed at the hopeless badness of C——'s speech. But the situation gained by the result, and still more by what passed on Monday.
The topic of the reason for delay is, as I hinted at my last moment, a very delicate one, and not to be discussed lightly. Suppose there is bloodshed in Ireland before the Protection Bill passes; then a reproach would lie at their door for thinking more of eventualities that regard themselves than of the immediate danger to life, and the heavy strain on families of small means dependent on their own or other people's rents. And there will be this argument to meet, that less severity in October or November would go farther than greater severity in March.
*****
The journey across France was really freezing. So I remained at Paris for a few hours' rest and no visits. Bisaccia came south in the same train, and Goldsmid, who gives me a dinner to-night. I see by the papers that it is still too cold for your pony-carriage.
My whole social philosophy consists in the desire not merely to gratify by civilities, but to bring men into contact with Mr. Gladstone—be it by breakfast, dinner, or small and early, or even by a formal talking to like ——'s—and your best art, together with the due discharge of pasteboard, will be to bring him to bear, directly, on the seventy or eighty men who want it, and are fit for it, and don't neglect Lady Spencer's parties, or Lady Granville's less multifarious evenings. It is the confrontation, not the ceremony, that matters. False believer,[[67]] because impostor, not to say hypocrite. I mean that, beyond his charitableness and a written eloquence that always fills me with an unspeakable admiration and delight, I do not believe in your artful philosopher; that the differences revealed to us by his writings, his conversation at Hawarden, the letter you treated so generously, cut down to the bone, and leave me no space or patience for anything better than a gracious courtesy. Therefore, in abetting your studies in Ruskinese, I am no better than a humbug, which is not a word to be written in books that will live and will irritate as long as the language.
La Madeleine Jan. 28, 1881
My faults are to you an opportunity of displaying those qualities to which you will not let me allude.
*****
Those are not truisms about George Eliot. The reality of her characters is generally perfect. They are not quite always vivid, or consistent. They degenerate sometimes into reminiscences. But they live a life apart from hers, and do not serve her purposes. I wonder whether Arthur Lyttelton knows any good German criticism of her; I don't think I have seen any.