Artificial fish culture seems to offer the only remedy for the evils which have been described.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
THE LIFE OF GEORGE ELIOT.
There is now and then a biography so written that the reader is able to become intimately acquainted with the subject, to feel after reading that he has had a personal contact, and has formed a friendship which is warm and living. Such “Lives” are rare. Most works of this kind are so biased by the interpretations of the author, so full of facts and opinions that the reader loses all feeling of companionship in reading; he closes the book, knowing much about the subject, but rarely understanding him. A book which presents a man or woman in that personal way which makes a friendship through the medium of the book possible, confers a great gift upon the reading public.
The peculiar fitness of Mr. Cross’s “Life of George Eliot”[B] for giving us a new friend, must be attributed to the really remarkable taste and skill of his editing. The work bears the mark of a reverential hand. It is an In Memoriam whose only object has been to lay before the world a memory too strong and precious to be kept secret. But no such a biography could have been given the world had it not been for the peculiar nature of George Eliot herself. The material for this “Life” grew out of two strong elements in her character: the affectionate and persistent friendship which led her to reveal herself so fully to those she loved in her letters, and that constant introspection which made her journal often a mirror of her inner life. These materials make up the book, which is largely a study of her character, and, too, of her character as she understood it. She has verily written her own life. The interpretation remains for the readers.
It would have been possible for Mr. Cross to have given much information about her character which he has withheld, her opinions and much of her conversation; but he has wisely given the world only what she herself chose to reveal to her friends.
The story begins early. The first revelations in character are the strongest; the happiness and misery of the future life are revealed in the childhood traits. The earliest revelations which we find in George Eliot’s life are of affection and ambition; either, if strong enough to become a passion, drives its possessor along a thorny path until it is itself mastered, and where both exist in a nature, continual collision must occur between them. Before each is satisfied there must be a life struggle of the keenest sort. Such a struggle was presaged for Marian Evans very early. She herself tells how, when she was but four years of age, she played on the piano, of which she did not know a note, in order to impress the servant with a proper notion of her acquirements and generally distinguished position. As eager, too, she was for love as for recognition. In her reminiscences of her early life most vividly she portrays her earliest passion—one very common among affectionate girls—her love for her brother. “She used always to be at his heels, insisting on doing everything that he did.” When his first boyish craze took possession of him in shape of a pony, and she found it was separating them, she was nearly heart broken. Impressible, eager for work and ambitious for knowledge, she began life under an emotional pressure, which drove her into incessant distress lest those she loved should fail her, and which brought her devotion to her loved ones in constant collision with her ambition. At twenty-one, writing to a very intimate friend, she said: “I do not mean to be so sinful as to say that I have not friends most undeservedly kind and tender, and disposed to form a far too favorable estimate of me, but I mean I have no one who enters into my pleasures and griefs, no one with whom I can pour out my soul.” Eight years after this, having lost her father, she went abroad for a few months’ residence, and her letters home were full of eager longing for their sympathy and restless fear lest they should forget her. No change in her life diminished this feeling. She became an editor of the Westminster Review, and while overwhelmed with manuscripts and proofs she wrote: “You must know that I am not a little desponding now and then, and think that old friends will die off, and I shall be left with no power to make new ones again.” Undoubtedly this feeling tended to make her morbid in her younger days, and consequently dwarf her power. It is an important study of her life to trace the gradual melting of this disposition, and the final growth into a healthy happiness. When quite past the heyday of her life, she wrote a friend of her girlhood: “I am one of those, perhaps, exceptional people whose early childish dreams were much less happy than the outcome of life,” and again, but four years before her death: “I have completely lost my personal melancholy. I often, of course, have melancholy thoughts about the destinies of my fellow creatures, but I am never in the mood of sadness, which used to be my frequent visitant, even in the midst of external happiness; and this, notwithstanding a very vivid sense that life is declining, and death close at hand.” This release from morbidness had two causes. She had taught her strong, affectional nature to find satisfaction in that commonplace, but little understood duty, loving her neighbors, and she had learned to enjoy things on their own account. The first article in this creed of happiness became George Eliot’s religion. She had abandoned her belief in the Christian religion when twenty-one years of age. She could not believe fully, and she was too independent and too reliant upon her own mind to conform to a religion she did not believe. The steps she took did not destroy the religious sense in her life. The earnestness which led her to write at nineteen, “May the Lord give me such an insight into what is truly good, that I may not rest contented with making Christianity a mere addendum to my pursuits, or with tacking it as a fringe to my garments;” which induced her to consider the novel and even oratorio as dangerous to spiritual development still remained, though without form. She was intensely in earnest, but it was many years before her love for mankind became a religion to her. A less strong character would have become flippant or scornful under this loss; hers only became more serious. She seems never to have forgotten what she had abandoned.
Though radically differing from most of her friends on religious questions, she never was uncharitable. “Of all intolerance, the intolerance calling itself philosophical is the most odious to me,” she wrote, and she lived out this opinion, in no way allowing the widest diversity to separate her from her friends. Her sympathy and charity indeed seem to increase, even if the breach in their opinion widened.