"May the Lord give me such an insight into what is truly good that I may not rest contented with making Christianity a mere addendum to my pursuits, or with tacking it as a mere fringe to my garments! May I seek to be sanctified wholly!"
This religious feeling she carried with her throughout life, although she soon left behind her the tenets and creeds of the church in which she was born and for which she had so strong an affection. In later life, although placing herself entirely outside of historic Christianity, and becoming a rationalist of the rationalists, the fervor of strong religious feeling never left her, and to her latest days she loved to read the Scriptures and to feel the glow of devotional feeling which belonged to her nature. The strong and powerful motive of her life in youth and age was the intense desire to aid and help the world, for which she felt a compassion so strong as to remind one of the descriptions given of Buddha in Eastern song and story. In every period of her life, in her most private letters and journals, this burden of the world's sorrow seemed to find expression, and her pitying love was almost Christ-like in its tenderness.
In forming an estimate of the woman we must never lose sight of this predominating feeling. Next to it in intensity is to be placed the longing for love and sympathy, the strength of the affections. No such deeply loving human heart has been pictured to the world in all the realm of books. To those who have been accustomed to think of George Eliot as the master-mind of her time, the greatest intellect of her generation, the revelation of her heart will be a great surprise and delight. A deep, strong, passionate, loving human soul, with heights and depths of devotion and tenderness unthinkable even to the poorer natures around her,—it was in this that both her strength and her weakness lay. This affectionateness was shown in her youth in her devotion to her father, whose home she kept for several years, and in lavish regard for the few friends who were near her, all of whom she retained and loved to her dying day. It was shown later on in the passionate and absorbing love she gave to Mr. Lewes throughout a lifetime, and which seemed but to deepen and widen with the years; and in the tenderness and thoughtfulness of the mother-love she gave to his children, and which seem to lack not one of the elements of real maternal feeling. This strong, pitying, passionate love of hers—a love hardly to be conceived of by cold and self-contained natures—is the key to the one action of her life requiring apology and charitable construction. In the first place, she pitied Mr. Lewes for the sorrows of his life and for the unfaithfulness of the wife upon whom he had lavished his heart's devotion, and whom he had forgiven for the first offence, only to be deceived the second time. Next, the strong feeling for justice which characterized her nature rebelled against that law which bound him to this unfaithful wife simply because he had once forgiven her; and, finally, the desire she felt to comfort his loneliness and redeem his life overcame all the scruples which the integrity of her nature must have confronted her with, and she defied the law which was odious to her and the conventionalities which were dear to her, in the same act, and assumed the tie which held her in such loyal allegiance until death severed it. Here is the only allusion she made to it in all her correspondence, as far as we know. This was written to one of her oldest friends, Mrs. Bray.
"If there is any one action or relation of my life which is, and always has been, profoundly serious, it is my relation to Mr. Lewes. It is, however, natural enough that you should mistake me in many ways, for not only are you unacquainted with Mr. Lewes's real character, and the course of his actions, but also it is several years since you and I were much together, and it is possible that the modifications my mind has undergone may be quite in the opposite direction of what you imagine. No one can be better aware than yourself that it is possible for two people to hold different opinions on momentous subjects with equal sincerity and an equally earnest conviction that their respective opinions are alone the truly moral ones. If we differ on the subject of the marriage laws, I at least can believe that you cleave to what you believe to be good, and I don't know of anything in the nature of your views that should prevent you from believing the same of me. How far we differ I think we neither of us know; for I am ignorant of your precise views, and apparently you attribute to me both feelings and opinions which are not mine. We cannot set each other right in letters; but one thing I can tell you in few words. Light and easily broken ties are what I neither desire theoretically nor could live for practically. Women who are satisfied with such ties do not act as I have done. That any unworldly, unsuperstitious person who is sufficiently acquainted with the realities of life can pronounce my relation to Mr. Lewes immoral, I can only understand by remembering how subtle and complex are the influences which mould opinion. But I do remember this, and I indulge in no arrogant or uncharitable thoughts about those who condemn us, even though we might have expected a somewhat different verdict. From the majority of persons we never, of course, looked for anything but condemnation. We are leading no life of self-indulgence, except, indeed, that being happy in each other we find everything easy. We are working hard to provide for others better than we provide for ourselves, and to fulfil every responsibility that lies upon us."
These responsibilities were not light, for they were poor and not yet famous, and must support by their pens not only themselves, but three boys of Mr. Lewes, and their mother. This they found no easy thing to do at first; but when the great success of George Eliot's novels had been attained, their financial affairs became easy, and continued so to the end.
Their life together seemed to be one of unbroken love and confidence, their delight in each other increasing, if possible, with time. The letters and journals of George Eliot are full of expressions of this love and trust, and give us very pleasing pictures of the character and life of Mr. Lewes. He seems to have been an eminently genial, kind, loving, and appreciative man; a man, too, of fascinating manners and wonderfully keen intellect, though totally lacking in any such genius as that which has made George Eliot immortal. Charming glimpses of their home life occur on every page,—a home life that was sweet and well ordered, pervaded by such a spirit of love and devotion as would sanctify any home. George Eliot was the most womanly of women, despite what is often called her masculine intellect; and she made a genuine home, after the true and womanly fashion, delighting in good order and neatness and such attention to details as is an absolute necessity in the formation of a happy home. She never allowed her literary work to prevent her from overseeing that home, and in her younger days seems to have had a real taste for executing these housekeeping details herself. There was no remote hint of Mrs. Jellyby in her, but strong, practical common-sense in all the management of her family affairs, and a real delight in having all things well ordered and agreeable in her home. This is one of the most pleasing of the many revelations of this book. We love to know that she was a true woman, and no intellectual monstrosity. The glimpses that are given of her nursing her father through his long last sickness are very sweet and touching, and everything connected with her devotion to Mr. Lewes's children, down to poor Thornie's death, makes us love her more and more. Indeed, it is a strong, pure, loving, and noble woman that is brought out on every page of this Life. But a very sad and deep-thoughted woman, too; one to whom pity goes out as naturally as love. She was afflicted with ill health all her life, and the record of all this suffering is at times oppressive. One cannot help wishing that we might have had the same woman strong and well, and wondering what sort of books would have been the result. Far pleasanter and more cheering, no doubt, for some of them are heart-breakingly sad as it is, but perhaps no deeper or truer. Then, too, she suffered keenly through her sympathies, feeling for all loss and wrong with the acutest pain; and her lack of faith intensified all her suffering. So did lack of hope; for she was almost as destitute of this cheering friend of man as Carlyle himself, and was given to despondency as the sparks fly upward. In her earlier writing the tears and smiles are blended, her humor lighting up the dark places; but the deepening years deepened her gloom, and her later writing is sombre almost throughout. Yet she had great capacity for joy as well as for sorrow, and enjoyed with the utmost intensity the brighter parts of life, and retained this sense of the pleasure of life even to the end. She speaks much of the intense happiness of her life with Mr. Lewes, and they seem never to have been separated, taking all journeys and holidays together, and never wearying of what she calls their "solitude à deux." Such expressions as these are very frequent throughout the book:—
"I never have anything to call out my ill-humor or discontent,—which you know was always ready enough to come on slight call,—and I have everything to call out love and gratitude. I am very happy,—happy in the highest blessing life can give us, the perfect love and sympathy of a nature that stimulates my own to healthful activity. My life has deepened unspeakably during the last year. I feel a greater capacity for moral and intellectual enjoyment, a more acute sense of my deficiencies in the past, a more solemn desire to be faithful to coming duties, than I remember at any former period of my life. And my happiness has deepened, too; the blessedness of a perfect love and union grows daily. Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long, sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age."
And this extract from the journal of Mr. Lewes leaves us his thought about their life, which is so like her own:—
"I owe Spencer another and a deeper debt. It was through him that I learned to know Marian,—to know her was to love her,—and since then my life has been a new birth. To her I owe all my prosperity and all my happiness. God bless her!"
That her great books would ever have been written without this loving sympathy and appreciation on the part of Mr. Lewes, seems extremely doubtful. She needed encouragement at every step, being prone to despair about her writings, and she had the utmost reliance upon the judgment and taste of the companion of her life. And he seems to have been everything that heart could desire as loving critic and counsellor. Her sympathy with the lives and hopes of others is very charming, particularly with the love and marriage of their eldest boy, though it is shown constantly in a true womanly way; as, for instance:—