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GEORGE ELIOT
It will be the duty of the more serious criticism of another generation in some degree to revive the reputation of George Eliot as an abiding literary force—a reputation which the taste of the hour is rather disposed to reduce. Five-and-twenty years ago the tendency was towards excessive praise: many judges, of trained literary insight, proclaimed her as the greatest genius of the age, one of the brightest stars of English literature, nay, said some of them, quite losing control of their speech—a modern Shakespeare, and so forth. Some cooler heads looked grave, but none save the inveterate cynics ventured to mock; and the great public, as usual, thought it best to follow the lead of so many men and so many women of the higher culture. The inevitable reaction ensued: when, not only were the grave shortcomings of George Eliot ruthlessly condemned, but her noble aim and superb qualities were blindly ignored.
The taste in popular romance sways hither and thither in sudden revulsion, like the taste in hats or in frocks, or the verdict of manhood suffrage. This or that type becomes suddenly the rage, this or that mannerism is voted an offence, as quickly as fashion runs after a new tint, or boycotts an obsolete sleeve. Journalism and all the other forces of the hour stimulate these caprices and carry away the masses by their volubility and noise. It is the business of serious criticism, keeping a cooler head, to correct these fervid impulses of the day—whilst excited audiences in the amphitheatre raise or depress the fatal thumb, awarding life or death to the combatants in the great arena.
The business of criticism is to judge—to judge upon the whole evidence, after hearing counsel on both sides with equal attention, after weighing every shred of argument and every word that any witness has to offer, and after patient study of every aspect of the case, to deliver a complete and reasoned estimate of the whole matter at issue. The true critic is not a mere juryman, who has nothing to do but to pronounce a bare verdict of "guilty" or "not guilty." He is a judge of the supreme court of equity, who may find, in some intricate story unravelled at his bar, a dozen errors in law and as many mistakes of fact, and yet may give substantial relief or may decree onerous penalties. It is easy enough to detect faulty, easy enough to insist on merits: the thing wanted to guide the public is the cool, compensated, equitable judgment that is not seduced by any conspicuous charm, and is not irritated by any incorrigible defect, but which, missing no point of merit and none of failure, finally and resolutely strikes the just balance.
This just balance, with all its intricate adjustments of compensation and equivalence, is peculiarly needed in the case of George Eliot, and at the same time is unusually difficult. George Eliot was most conspicuous as an artist, as a worker in the sphere of imagination and creation. At the same time, she had very rare powers and a really unusual learning quite outside of imaginative art. And these reflective powers and such stores of knowledge are often antagonistic to creative art, and undoubtedly were so not seldom with her. If Aristotle himself had written a dull psychological tragedy, we might read it for his sake, but we should not forgive him, and we ought not to forgive him. And if Shakespeare himself had written the Novum Organum or the Principia, we should not have had Hamlet and Lear as we now know them. There is no compensation between philosophy and poetry. No profundity, no learning, can give beauty to verses which lack the divine fire. If George Eliot's fame has to be based solely on her great powers and endowments, her art would not be worth much. However, it is not so: she was an artist, with true artistic gifts. Her philosophic power and her scientific attainments often ennoble these gifts: yet it is too often evident that they seriously mar and embarrass them.
Turn it the other way. Until nearly the age of forty, George Eliot was known only as a critical and philosophical writer. And in reading, in logical acumen, and in breadth of view, she was the equal of the first minds of her time. But no one of her contemporaries, eminent in philosophy and science, approached her, however remotely, in artistic gifts; and no one of them even attempted to invest ethical and social ideas with high imagination and beautiful ideals. Thus, George Eliot was of a far higher mental plane than any contemporary who has used imaginative prose as an art, and she was also a far greater artist than any contemporary philosopher. It is quite certain that learning and wisdom may be lodged in the same brain with the highest poetry, as Lucretius, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Goethe may prove. And men of original power have not seldom used imaginative art with signal success to convey the ideas with which they were charged; for this has been done by Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, Rousseau, Byron, Shelley, and Goethe.
It is therefore legitimate and natural that a powerful and teeming mind should resort to art as its medium, and also that an artist of high aims should be a systematic thinker and an omnivorous student. The combination is very rare and success is singularly difficult. To fail in art is to lose all and to end in utter failure. And to carry ethical purpose and erudition into art is indeed a perilous undertaking, wherein but one or two of the greatest have wholly succeeded. The problem with George Eliot is to judge how far she has succeeded in the all but impossible task. That her success is far from complete is but too obvious. That she has had many incidental successes is also obvious. Her work is not sufficiently spontaneous, not easy or simple, not buoyant enough. But it has great nobility, rare distinction. It may not live as perfect art; but it should not perish as ambitious failures perish.
If George Eliot were not a writer of romance, she was nothing at all in the front ranks of Victorian literature. With all her powers of mind, her mastery of language, her immense stores of knowledge and supreme culture, she gave to the world nothing of great mark, acknowledged and known as hers, except her famous romances; for, as we shall presently see, we cannot count any of the poems as of great mark. But, as a writer of romance, George Eliot differs essentially and for the worse from all the other great writers of romance in her own or preceding generations. Most certainly she was not a born romancer; she had no spontaneous gift of telling stories, no irrepressible genius that way. Now all the great romancers have been born to it, as Robinson Crusoe was born to the sea, or as Turner was born to paint. Though Scott published novels late, he had begun Waverley at thirty-four; his earlier works are romantic ballads and metrical romances; and from boyhood, at home and abroad, he was ever filled with some tale of adventure and character. Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth "lisped" in novelettes, as Pope said he "lisped in numbers." Though Charlotte Brontë published so little, she wrote stories incessantly from childhood. Lytton, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, invented tales as part of their daily lives, and from the earliest age. But George Eliot was thirty-nine when her first tales were published, and she was forty before she was known to the public as a novelist at all. And so little was novel-writing her natural gift, that her most intimate friends never suspected her power, nor did she herself altogether enjoy the exercise of her art. To the last her periods of mental gestation were long, painful, and unhopeful. Parturition was a dangerous crisis, and the long-expected infant was reared with misgivings and a superfluity of coddling. The romances of George Eliot came like some enfant de miracle, born late in the mother's life, at the cost of infinite pain, much anxiety, and amidst the wondering trepidation of expectant circles of friends.
Even in her best books we never quite get over the sense of almost painful elaboration, of a powerful mind having rich gifts striving to produce some rare music with an unfamiliar and uncongenial instrument. It reminds us of Beethoven evolving his majestic sonatas on an untuned and dilapidated old piano, the defects of which he could not himself hear. The conventional critic in The Vicar of Wakefield is told to say that "the picture would have been better if the artist had taken more pains." With George Eliot too often we are made to feel that the picture would have been, at any rate, more enjoyable if the artist had taken less pains. To study her more ambitious tales is like an attempt to master some new system of psychology. The metaphysical power, the originality of conception, the long brooding over anomalies and objections—these are all there: but the rapid improvisation and easy invention are not there. Such qualities would indeed be wholly out of place in philosophy, but they are the essence of romance. In romance we want to feel that the piece is only brought to an end by time and our human powers of listening; that there is "plenty more where these come from"; that the story-teller enjoys telling stories for their own sake, and would go on with the tales, though the audience were reduced to a child, an idiot, and a deaf man.