This instinctive faith in mind is the basis of all genuine idealism. The idealist is not the creator of an imaginary world, peopling it with shapes that never existed; but he is one who believes in ideas, and in mind as their creator and the vehicle of their expression. Contemporary with George Eliot was a group of men who believed in the mind as something other than the temporary product of an evolutionary process. With them she may be contrasted, her work may be measured by theirs. Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning and Buskin shared with her the radical ideas of the time. Not one of them has been fettered by narrow theories or cramped by old social doctrines. The broad, inquiring, scientific spirit of the time has been shared by them all. Buskin is a realist, Carlyle believed in the enduring realm of facts, and they have all accepted the spirit of naturalism which has ruled the century. The scientific, philosophic and social theories of the time have been their inspiration. Certain ideas about law, progress and social regeneration have affected them through and through. Yet as regards the one great characteristic of idealism, all have widely departed from George Eliot, for all regard mind as supreme, all believe in a spiritual realm environing man. This fact appears throughout their work. To them the spiritual is objective; they are the true realists. To George Eliot the spiritual is subjective, the result of our own feelings, to which it is limited. When the feelings are gone, all is gone. In the pages of these men there is consequently to be found a power and an inspiration not to be found in hers. Wonderful as is her skill as an artist, and in the analysis of character, yet we feel that we are walking over mocking graves whenever we reach her spiritual conception of the world. She deceives us with a shadow, offers us a name in place of what we crave for with every nobler instinct of the soul. Our own feelings are given us, mirrored in the feelings of others, in place of the reality we desire to possess.
These men have linked their work with those spiritual convictions which have been the moral sustenance of the ages. They have gained in strength and effectiveness thereby. Tennyson has his many doubts, his teachings have been questioned; and yet he sings,—
"That each, who seems a separate whole,
Should move his rounds, and passing all
The skirts of self again, should fall,
Remerging in the general soul,—
"Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet."
His flight of song is more sustained for this faith. He is a truer poet, of stronger wing and loftier flight, because life has for him an infinite meaning, because he opens his mind to the impressions which come of man's spiritual existence. In the same way, Carlyle has a grander meaning running through his books, more of sublimity, a finer eloquence, because the spiritual is to him real. Doubter and scorner as he was, he could not but see that man's being reaches beyond the material world and interprets some higher realm. Vague as that faith was with him, it was a source of the most effective literary power and stimulus. He bursts forth, under its impulse, into impassioned passages of the noblest poetic beauty.
"Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognize one another. As it is written, we shall be forever with God. The possibility, nay (in some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer to me."
Ruskin has made it plain how necessary is that tone of mind which is religious to the best work in art. His own faith has been earnest and strong in the reality of the spiritual. Realist as he is in art, he believes in the original and creative power of the mind, and his work has all taken on a higher spirit and a finer expression because of his religious convictions. Writing in Modern Painters of man as made in the image of God, he answers the objection which is raised to the idea that all the revelation man has is contained in a being so imperfect.
"No other book, nor fragment of book, than that, will you ever find,—nothing in the clouds above, nor in the earth beneath. The flesh-bound volume is the only revelation that is, that was, or that can be. In that is the image of God painted; in that is the law of God written; in that is the promise of God revealed. Know thyself; for through thyself only thou canst know God. Through the glass, darkly; but except through the glass, in no wise. A tremulous crystal, waved as water, poured out upon the ground;—you may defile it, despise it, pollute it at your pleasure and at your peril; for on the peace of those weak waves must all the heaven you shall ever gain be first seen; and through such purity as you can win for those dark waves must all the light of the risen Sun of Righteousness be bent down by faint refraction. Cleanse them, and calm them, as you love your life. Therefore it is that all the power of nature depends on subjection to the human soul. Man is the Sun of the world; more than the real sun. The fire of his wonderful heart is the only light and heat worth gauge or measure. Where he is, are the tropics; where he is not, the ice-world."
Such words may not be scientific, but they convey real meaning. Their assertion that the world is to be tested and understood by man, not man by the world, is one worthy of attention. The conviction of this truth has a literary power and incentive not to be found in "the scientific method" or any of its corollaries.
To this group of writers may be added Mrs. Browning, who, as a poet, did great and lasting work. Its value, in large measure, rests on its depth of spiritual conviction, and on its idealism in purpose and spirit. Her conception of love is finer and truer than George Eliot's, because she gave it an ideal as well as an altruistic meaning; because she thought it has an eternal as well as a social significance. As a poet she lost nothing of charm or of power or of inspiration because she could herself believe, with simple trust, what she has embodied in "A Child's Thought of God."