This habit of thought and feeling resulted in much personal moral benefit. “My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.”
As she grew older, she comforted herself with the thought that “with that renunciation of self which age inevitably brings we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others.” She tried for “a religion which must express less care for personal consolation and a more deeply awing sense of responsibility to man, springing from sympathy with that which of all things is most certainly known to us, the difficulty of the human lot.” This was the great lesson in her growth toward happiness. A secondary step was her appreciation of the value of things in themselves. It is a serious obstacle to the happiness of women, that in the main they care for exterior life only as it is of value in the personal life. A book is dear because a friend has read or recommended it. This verse is fine from association; this strain of music because they heard it in a certain connection. Take the personal out of Art and Nature, and too often women care little for them. George Eliot learned to appreciate and love things for their own value. Music, to which she was from childhood deeply susceptible, she cultivated thoroughly, and no fine rendering of good music ever was missed by her. She took the true, high view of life, which declares that from every good all possible enjoyment should be gained. Art was very dear to her, and we find in these quotations from her journal, notes on all the leading galleries of Europe, but in the very midst of her art studies she drops this comment, after noting a sight she had had of the snow covered Alps: “Sight more to me than all the art in Munich, though I love the art nevertheless. The great, wide-stretching earth, and the all-embracing sky—the birthright of us all—are what I care most to look at.”
But it would have been impossible for even her deep love for mankind, her fine enjoyment of the good and beautiful, to have completed her life. These things satisfied her affections, but there was another quality we have mentioned as prominent in her life: it was her ambition. At twenty she wrote despondently: “I feel that my besetting sin is the one of all others most destroying, as it is the faithful parent of them all—ambition, a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow-creatures.” Whatever she did, was done with all her might. Her mother died early, and she became housekeeper. Her struggles with the knotty questions of housewifery kept her in a constant worry, but she would do things right—whether it be currant jelly or a German translation. The same perfection marked her novels. Her progress was soon marked; it recommended her to people of standing, and gradually she had a circle of friends—people of strong minds and much culture—about her. Eager to do something, a way opened to her in 1844, when she was twenty-five years old. It was to translate into English a work of the German philosopher, Strauss. She did it, and what was better, did it well. Five years later she writes: “The only ardent hope I have for my future life is to have given me some woman’s duty.” The ambition to excel is already bending to the stronger emotion of affection. For a long time she worked, eager and anxious, but nothing seemed to open. In 1851 she went to London as assistant editor of Westminster Review, and here most satisfactory opportunities for culture opened. She formed lasting friendships with Herbert Spenser, Harriet Martineau, Florence Nightingale, and indeed with all the people worth knowing, who filled London in the ’fifties. But her editing left no opportunity to do that special work to which she was looking, and which she did not understand. She wrote many reviews and essays. This writing was a sort of safety valve for her intellect, but it was not until September, 1856, that the new era began in her life. It was when she began to write fiction. The popular idea of fiction as stories which will do to kill time, but which for serious reading are quite useless, was not the idea of George Eliot. A nature so intensely serious, so anxious for noble work, could not content itself with trivial story telling; she did not aim at that, but at studies of life. As she finely writes to Mr. John Blackwood, who became her publisher: “My artistic bent is directed not all to the presentation of irreproachable character, but to the presentation of mixed human beings, in such a way as to call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy. And I can not step aside from what I feel to be true in character.” And again: “I should like to touch every heart among my readers with nothing but loving humor, with tenderness, with belief in goodness.” The story of her great success is familiar—her books are well known. In rapid succession she sent out “Scenes of Clerical Life,” “Adam Bede,” “The Mill on the Floss,” “Silas Marner,” “Romola,” “Felix Holt,” “The Spanish Gypsy,” “Middlemarch,” “Daniel Deronda,” and “Theophrastus Such.” Her convictions about how she should work were intense. She wrote and lived her story, and once when urged to re-write a tale, replied that she could no more re-write a book than she could live over a year in her own life. Her novels are the embodiment of what she had felt, written that they might strengthen others. The conscientiousness with which she labored made her work sometimes most painful to her. Despondency lest she should fail, fear lest she had misinterpreted a character, depression lest this chapter should fall below a preceding in merit, tortured her in succession, but she worked because she believed she had found her place, and to do her best for mankind was her religion. The slow-growing nature struggling with eager desire for human love, and with a mastering ambition, not often reaches so ripe a stage as did hers. The rigid system of self-culture which she pursued through her life was the outgrowth of her ambition and of her intense interest in things, an interest which we have noticed as being one of the leading elements in her happiness. Reading, study, conversation, observation, writing, travel, were in turns employed in her course of self-discipline. She read incessantly, and thoroughly. Notice this list of books, the work of one month, and that when she was nearly fifty years of age: First book of “Lucretius;” sixth book of the “Iliad;” “Samson Agonistes;” Warton’s “History of English Poetry;” “Grote,” second volume; “Marcus Aurelius;” “Vita Nuova,” vol. iv; chapter one of the “Politique Positive;” Guest on “English Rhythms;” Maunce’s “Lectures on Casuistry.” Few months fell below this in reading, and this, too, while she was writing, seeing people, conversing, and suffering, for she had the misfortune to know, as she says, that “one thing is needful: a good digestion.”
As a life of earnest purpose, of continued struggle for a high living, of deepest desire to make the most of everything, and for everybody, there is none more marked than that of George Eliot. Non-conformity to the religion and the law in which we believe, must sadden her life for all, but an honest student of her character must, after reading this “Life,” accord to her what she herself never failed to give to the erring—charity.
FOOTNOTES
[B] George Eliot’s Life, as related in her Letters and Journals. Arranged and edited by her husband, J. W. Cross. In three volumes. New York: Harper & Brothers.