George Eliot in 1864 From the Etching by Mr. Paul Rajon—Drawn by Mr. Frederick Burton—From the Frontispiece to the First Edition of "George Eliot's Life," by Her Husband, J.W. Cross[ToList]
Of all English novelists, George Eliot was probably the best equipped in minute and accurate scholarship. Trained as few college graduates are trained, she was impelled for several years to take up the study of German metaphysics. Her mind, like her face, was masculine in its strength, and though she suffered in her youth from persistent ill-health, she conquered this in her maturity and wrought with passionate ardor at all her literary tasks. So keen was her conscience that she often defeated her own ends by undue labor, as in the preparation for Romola, whose historical background swamps the story.
Above all she was a preacher of a stern morality. She laid down the moral law that selfishness, like sin, corrodes the best nature, and that the only happiness lies in absolute forgetfulness of self and in working to make others happy. Thus all her books are full of little sermons on life, preached with so much force that they cannot fail to make a profound impression even upon the careless reader.
George Eliot impresses one as a very sad woman, with an eager desire to recapture the lost religious faith of her happy, unquestioning childhood and a still more passionate desire to believe in that immortality which her cold agnostic creed rejected as illogical. It was pitiful, this strong-minded woman reaching out for the things that less-endowed women accept without question. It was even more pitiful to see her, with her keen moral sense, violate all the conventions of English law and society in order to take up life with the man who stimulated her mind and actually made her one of the greatest of English novelists.
Left alone, it is very doubtful whether George Eliot ever would have found herself, ever would have developed that mine of reminiscence which produced those perfect early stories of English country life. To George Henry Lewes, the man for whose love and companionship she incurred social ostracism, readers in all English-speaking countries owe a great debt of gratitude, for it was his wise counsel and his constant stimulus and encouragement which resulted in making George Eliot a writer of fine novels instead of an essayist on ethical and religious subjects. It detracts little from this debt that Lewes was also responsible for the stimulus of George Eliot's bent toward philosophical speculation and to that cold if clear scientific thought, which spoiled parts of Middlemarch and ruined Daniel Deronda.
Marian Evans was born at Ashbury farm in Warwickshire in 1819 and died in 1880. Her father was the agent for a large estate, and the happiest hours of her girlhood were spent in driving about the country with him. Those keen eyes which saw so deeply into human nature were early trained to observe all the traits of the English rustic, and those childish impressions gave vitality to her humorous characters. Before she was ten years old Marian had read Scott and Lamb, as well as Pilgrim's Progress and Rasselas. When thirteen years old she revealed unusual musical gifts. She had the misfortune at seventeen to lose her mother, and for years after she managed her father's house.
Evidently the old farmer, whom his daughter has sketched with loving hand in Adam Bede, took great pride in the mental superiority of his daughter, for he hired tutors for her in Latin, Greek, Italian and German. All four languages she mastered as few college men master them. She read everything, both old and new, and her intimacy with the wife of Charles Bray of Coventry led her to refuse to go to church. This free thinking angered her father and caused him to demand that she leave his house. After three weeks her love and her keen sense of duty led her to conform to her father's wishes and to resume the church-going, which in his eyes was a part of life that could not be dropped.
But that early departure from the established religion carried her into the field of German skepticism. She translated Strauss' Life of Jesus. For three years her studies were interrupted by the serious illness of her father. When he died she went to Geneva and remained on the Continent a year. Then she came home and took up her residence with the Brays. The development of her mind was very rapid. She served for some time as editor of the Westminster Review. She then formed a strong friendship with Herbert Spencer, and through Spencer she met George Henry Lewes, who made a special study of Goethe and the German philosophers, and who was the editor of the Leader, the organ of the Free Thinkers.