It was now that a new star was rising in the literary firmament, not of the “shooting” or transitory species, and the genius of Marian Evans (George Eliot) was casting its genial penetrating radiance over Great Britain and the United States. She was as difficult a person to meet with as Hawthorne himself, and they never saw one another; but a friend of Mr. Bennoch, who lived at Coventry, invited the Hawthornes there in the first week of February to meet Bennoch and others, and Marian Evans would seem to have been the chief subject of conversation at the table that evening. What Hawthorne gathered concerning her on that occasion he has preserved in this compact and discriminating statement:
“Miss Evans (who wrote ‘Adam Bede’) was the daughter of a steward, and gained her exact knowledge of English rural life by the connection with which this origin brought her with the farmers. She was entirely self-educated, and has made herself an admirable scholar in classical as well as in modern languages. Those who knew her had always recognized her wonderful endowments, and only watched to see in what way they would develop themselves. She is a person of the simplest manners and character, amiable and unpretending, and Mrs. B—— spoke of her with great affection and respect.”
There is actually more of the real George Eliot in this summary than in the three volumes of her biography by Mr. Cross.
Thorwaldsen’s well-known simile in regard to the three stages of sculpture, the life, the death and the resurrection, also has its application to literature. The manuscript is the birth of an author’s work, and its revision always seems like taking the life out of it; but when the proof comes, it is like a new birth, and he sees his design for the first time in its true proportions. Then he goes over it as the sculptor does his newly-cast bronze, smoothing the rough places and giving it those final touches which serve to make its expression clearer. Hawthorne was never more to be envied than while correcting the proof of “The Marble Faun” at Leamington. The book was given to the public at Easter-time; and there seems to have been only one person in England that appreciated it, even as a work of art—John Lothrop Motley. The most distinguished reviewers wholly failed to catch the significance of it; and even Henry Bright, while warmly admiring the story, expressed a dissatisfaction at the conclusion of it,—although he could have found a notable precedent for that in Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister.” The Saturday Review, a publication similar in tone to the New York Nation, said of “Transformation:”
{Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 250.}
“A mystery is set before us to unriddle; at the end the author turns round and asks us what is the good of solving it. That the impression of emptiness and un-meaningness thus produced is in itself a blemish to the work no one can deny. Mr. Hawthorne really trades upon the honesty of other writers. We feel a sort of interest in the story, slightly and sketchily as it is told, because our experience of other novels leads us to assume that, when an author pretends to have a plot, he has one.”
The Art Journal said of it: {Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 249.}
“We are not to accept this book as a story; in that respect it is grievously deficient. The characters are utterly untrue to nature and to fact; they speak, all and always, the sentiments of the author; their words also are his; there is no one of them for which the world has furnished a model.”
And the London Athenaeum said: {Footnote: Ibid., ii. 244.}
“To Mr. Hawthorne truth always seems to arrive through the medium of the imagination.... His hero, the Count of Monte Beni, would never have lived had not the Faun of Praxiteles stirred the author’s admiration.... The other characters, Mr. Hawthorne must bear to be told, are not new to a tale of his. Miriam, the mysterious, with her hideous tormentor, was indicated in the Zenobia of ‘The Blithedale Romance.’ Hilda, the pure and innocent, is own cousin to Phoebe in ‘The House of the Seven Gables’.”