This explains the paradox that the most popular, and most certainly the most praised of George Eliot's works, are the simpler and the shorter. Every one enjoys the Scenes of Clerical Life, short stories of a hundred pages each, with simple plots and a few characters in everyday life. I have no doubt myself that Silas Marner comes nearer to being a great success than any of the more elaborate books. Yet Silas Marner is about one-fifth part of the length of Middlemarch; and its plot, mise-en-scène, and incidents are simplicity itself. There is no science, no book-learning, and but few ethical problems in it from beginning to end; and it all goes in one small volume, for the tale concerns but the neighbours of one quiet village. Yet the quaint and idyllic charm of the piece, the perfection of tone and keeping, the harmony of the landscape, the pure, deep humanity of it, all make it a true and exquisite work of high art.
Modern English (and I am one of those who hold that the best modern English is as good as any in our literature) has few pieces of description more gem-like in its crystalline facets than the opening chapter that tells of the pale, uncanny weaver of Raveloe in his stone cottage by the deserted pit. Some of us can remember such house weavers in such lonesome cottages on the Northern moors, and have heard the unfamiliar rattle of the loom in a half-ruinous homestead. How perfect is that vignette of Raveloe—"a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices"—with its "strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship among the grey-haired peasantry"! The entire picture of the village and its village life a hundred years ago, is finished with the musical and reserved note of poetry, such as we are taught to love in Wordsworth and Tennyson. And for quiet humour modern literature has few happier scenes than the fireside at the "Rainbow," with Macey and Winthrop, the butcher and the farrier, over their pipes and their hot potations, and the quarrel about "seeing ghos'es," about smelling them!
Within this most graceful and refined picture of rural life there is a dominant ethical motive which she herself describes as its aim, "to set in a strong light the remedial influences of pure, natural, human relations." This aim is perfectly worked out: it is a right and healthy conception, not too subtle, not too common:—to put it in simpler words than hers, it is how a lonely, crabbed, ill-used old man is humanised by the love of a faithful and affectionate child. The form is poetic: the moral is both just and noble: the characters are living, and the story is original, natural, and dramatic. The only thing, indeed, which Silas Marner wants to make it a really great romance is more ease, more rapidity, more "go." The melody runs so uniformly in minor keys, the sense of care, meditation, and introspection is so apparent in every line, the amount of serious thought lavished by the writer and required of the reader is so continuous, that we are not carried away, we are not excited, inspired, and thrilled as we are by Jane Eyre or Esmond. We enjoy a beautiful book with a fine moral, set in exquisite prose, with consummate literary resources, full of fine thoughts, true, ennobling thoughts, and with no weak side at all, unless it be the sense of being over-wrought, like a picture which has been stippled over in every surface.
A clever French woman said of George Eliot's conversation—elle s'écoute quand elle parle! Just so, as we read on we seem to see how she held up each sentence into the light as it fell from her pen, scrutinised it to see if some rarer phrase might not be compacted, some subtler thought excogitated. Of all the more important tales, Silas Marner is that wherein we least feel this excessive thoughtfulness. And thus it is the best. Perhaps other born romancers would have thrown into it more life, energy, jollity, or passion. Thackeray would have made the weaver a serio-comic hermit: Dickens would have made Eppie a sentimental angel; Charlotte Brontë would have curdled our blood; Trollope might have made more of Nancy's courting. But no one of them could have given us a more lofty lesson "of the remedial influences of pure, natural, human relations." The only doubt is, whether a novel is the medium for such lessons. On this, opinions are, and will remain, divided. The lesson and the art ought both to be faultless.
When we ask for a romance fully developed and more than a graceful vignette, Adam Bede must be regarded as the principal, and with the wider public it is always the typical, work of George Eliot. She said herself that it seemed to her "impossible that she should ever write anything so good and true again":—and herein she was no doubt right. It is the only one of her works in prose or verse which we feel to be inevitable, spontaneous, written out of the abundance of enjoyment and experience. It is of all her books the heartiest, the wittiest, the most cheerful, or rather the least desponding. In that book it may be that she exhausted herself and her own resources of observation as an eye-witness. She wrote fine things in other veins, in different scenes, and she conceived other characters and new situations. But for all practical purposes Adam Bede was the typical romance, which everything she had thought or known impelled her to write, in which she told the best of what she had seen and the most important of what she had to say. Had she never written anything but Adam Bede, she would have had a special place of her own in English romance:—and I am not sure that anything else which she produced very materially raised, enlarged, or qualified that place.
The Mill on the Floss must always be very interesting to all who knew George Eliot and loved her work, if for no other reason, for its autobiographic and personal touches and its revelation of yearnings and misgivings hardly suspected in life. There are scenes and minor characters in it which hold their own against Adam Bede, but as a whole it is not so strong or so rich in colour, and it can hardly be said to occupy new ground. It has not the pathos of Amos Barton, nor the exquisite style of Silas Marner, nor the breadth and constructive merit of Adam Bede. And except to the chosen band of Eliotists, it is not likely to retain any permanent popularity. It is a book to study for those who have special interest in George Eliot as woman, as teacher, and as artist—but for my own part I find it rather a book to reflect upon than a book to read and to re-read.
With respect to Romola, though we must all agree with Mr. Oscar Browning that it is "replete with learning," "weighed with knowledge in every page," exquisite in art, and so forth, it is really impossible to call it with him "the best historical novel ever written." Even in exact reproduction of another age, it cannot compare with Esmond, and how immeasurably as romance is it beneath the fire and movement of a dozen historical romances that one could name! The beauty of the Florentine pictures, the enormous care, thought, and reading, lavished on the story, the variety of literary resource—all make it a most memorable work, a work almost sui generis, a book which every student of Italy, every lover of Florence must mark, learn, and inwardly digest. But to call it a complete success is to go too far. The task was too great. To frame in a complex background of historical erudition an ethical problem of even greater complexity and subtlety—this was a task which might have sorely tried even greater powers than hers—a task in which Goethe and Scott might have succeeded, but which Goethe and Scott were too truly the born artists to attempt without ample care, and too busy with many things to devote to it the required labour.
Romola is certainly a wonderful monument of literary accomplishments; but it remains a tour de force, too elaborate, too laboured, too intricate, too erudite. As the French say, it has trop de choses, it is too long, too full, over-costumed, too studiously mounted on the stage. We sometimes see nowadays "a Shakespearean revival," with scenery studied by eminent artists on the spot, costumes archaeologically accurate, real armour, "properties" from famous collections, a mise-en-scène of lavish splendour and indefatigable research—and then we ask, how can "Hamlet" or "Lear" live up to such learning, and why is "Romeo" such a melancholy devil? Few men enjoyed the earlier portions of Romola more than I did. Italianissimo and Florentissimo as I was, it was an intense treat. But, though I have read and re-read Romola from time to time, it has always been in sections. I have never read it straight through at one time; and to this hour, I am not quite clear about all the ramifications of the plot and the various cross-purposes of the persons. Could any one say this about Quentin Durward or Ivanhoe, or of the Last Days of Pompeii, or of Esmond or even of Hypatia or Westward Ho!
Romola, we know, tried its author most cruelly in composition, nor need we wonder at this. "I began it,", she said, "a young woman—I finished it an old woman." "It ploughed into her," said her husband, "more than any of her other books." And, in my opinion, it marks the decline of her genius. I cannot count any of the later books as equal to her earlier works. Her great period of production reaches at most over the six years 1858-1863 (aetat. 39-45), in which she produced Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and Romola (1863). If we measure by strict success in the highest art, this period should not be extended beyond the four years which closed with Silas Marner. Romola is an ambitious, beautiful, altogether noble essay to fly skyward like Icarus, whose ingenious mechanism was melted by the sunlight in mid-career. And I cannot count any of the later pieces, prose or verse, as anything but inferior to Romola. They have great beauties, fine passages, subtle characters, and high conceptions—but they are the artificial products of a brain that showed symptoms of exhaustion, of a great writer who was striving after impossible tasks without freedom and without enjoyment.
I cannot at all agree with those admirers of George Eliot's genius who believe that it grew continuously in power, who even assure us that it reached its zenith in Daniel Deronda. What can they mean? Daniel Deronda, as usual, shows brilliant literary skill in many passages, and its insight into modern Hebraism is a psychological problem. But with all its merits and even beauties, Daniel Deronda has the fatal defect of unpleasant characters who are neither beautiful nor interesting, terrible situations which bore rather than terrify us, a plot which is at once preposterous and wearisome. As to Middlemarch—George Eliot's longest, most crowded, and ethically most elaborated romance—with all its subtlety, its humour, its variety, and its sardonic insight into provincial Philistinism, it becomes at last tedious and disagreeable by reason of the interminable maunderings of tedious men and women, and the slow and reiterated dissection of disagreeable anatomies. At this moment I cannot, after twenty years, recall the indefinite, lingering plot, or the precise relations to each other of the curiously uninteresting families, who talk scandal and fuss about in Middlemarch town.