The Age of Tennyson

by Hugh Walker

Apart from the moral and social aspects of the question, the influence of Lewes upon George Eliot’s literary career seems to have been mixed. On the one hand, it must be said that he acted with a delicate generosity for which his general character hardly prepares us. He encouraged her efforts, recognised her genius, avowed that all he was and all he did himself were due to her, and voluntarily sank into the second place. It is at least possible that without such fostering care the genius of George Eliot would not have run so smooth and successful a course. Further, the very difficulties due to the relation add a deeper note to her voice. There is often a solemn, almost tragic tone in her utterances about domestic life which might have been absent had all been smooth between the world and herself.

On the other hand, Lewes, loyally as he effaced himself, could not but foster tendencies in her mind which were strong enough without his encouragement. He was a philosopher, imbued with the tenets of positivism; and she was naturally prone to be fascinated by abstract thought. Not that she was ever exactly original in philosophic speculation: the danger would have been less had she been so. But she hungered for philosophy, took the results proclaimed for absolute truth, and wove them into the fabric of her own work. From the Scenes of Clerical Life to Daniel Deronda and Theophrastus Such her writings became more and more loaded with philosophy. The two last-named books are decidedly overloaded; and even Middlemarch, the most massive, and probably on the whole the greatest outcome of her genius, would be still greater were it somewhat lightened of the burden.

Blackwood, the nurse of so much genius, in January, 1857, contained the first part of what became the Scenes of Clerical Life. Adam Bede appeared in 1859, The Mill on the Floss in the following year, and Silas Marner in 1861. Romola (1863) was the outcome of a journey to Italy in 1860. After Felix Holt (1866) George Eliot attempted poetry, and visited Spain to gather materials for The Spanish Gypsy (1868). Her only other long poem, The Legend of Jubal, was published with other pieces in 1874. Middlemarch was issued in eight parts in 1871 and 1872. Daniel Deronda (1876) was her last novel; and the Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879) was her last work. In 1878 Lewes died; and in April, 1880, George Eliot married Mr. J. W. Cross, but survived the union less than a year, dying December 22, 1880.

George Eliot’s place is certainly among the great novelists. At the lowest, she is classed after Scott, Dickens and Thackeray (and a few might add Jane Austen); at the highest, she is placed above them all. She carried by storm the intellect of one of the most thoughtful and weighty of critics, Edmond Scherer, who in his Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine devoted three essays to her, which have been admirably translated by Professor Saintsbury. In the last of these Scherer goes so far as to say that for her ‘was reserved the honour of writing the most perfect novels yet known.’ In spite of the note of exaggeration this judgment is significant. Only a writer, not merely of genius, but of great genius, could have drawn it from a critic so sober-minded; a foreigner, unbiassed by the predilections of patriotism; a man of wide knowledge, well aware of all that his sweeping assertion implied.

Most writers, even the greatest, have loaded themselves with a weight of literary lumber. George Eliot carries less of such impedimenta than many, but it will be well nevertheless to put aside at once such works as are neither in her special field nor in her best manner. Under this head fall the heavy and laboured volume of essays entitled Impression of Theophrastus Such, and also the poems. The latter, thoughtful, and occasionally eloquent, nevertheless prove that the writer had not the gift of verse. Richard Congreve described The Spanish Gypsy as ‘a mass of positivism.’ The description is accurate; and perhaps the fact that it is so is, to others who are not positivists, a heavier objection than it was to him. The Legend of Jubal, though better, is not great poetry.

Leaving these works then aside, the novels of George Eliot fall pretty clearly into three groups, which conform to the divisions of chronology. In the first we have at one extreme the Scenes of Clerical Life, and at the other Silas Marner; in the second Romola stands alone; in the third, Felix Holt, the weakest if not the least readable of all, is transitional; while Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda illustrate her later manner respectively in full flower and in decay.

Each of these groups has found special admirers among critics. George Eliot herself was disposed to prefer Romola to all her other works; but she seems to have been swayed by the consideration that it had cost her more than any other book. Romola has been praised also as a marvellous picture of Florentine life in the fifteenth century. Only men who are profoundly versed in Italian character, literature and history are entitled to pronounce upon the question; and they are few in number. But if the statement be true the fact is wonderful, for George Eliot had only spent about six weeks in Florence before she wrote the book. In any case it smells of the lamp, and we may therefore suspect that it will give less permanent pleasure than most of her novels. Tito Melema is admitted to be a masterpiece of subtle delineation; but for the most part the picture of Romola, her home and her associates, is laboured to a degree almost painful.

Of the two other groups, if we take them as wholes, there can be little hesitation in assigning the palm to the earlier. The excellence here is evener, the artistic skill finer, the style more uniformly pleasing. The evenness of quality is proved by the fact that each work in turn has been praised as the author’s best, or at least as equal to her best; whereas there can be no reasonable doubt about the pre-eminence of Middlemarch in the last group. The artistic excellence, again, of Silas Marner, perhaps the most faultless (which does not necessarily mean the best) of English novels, is as conspicuous as are the artistic defects of Middlemarch. And as to style, nearly all readers have felt how the fresh, easy grace, the flexibility of language, the lightness of touch, gradually disappear from the works of George Eliot; and how in her later books passages of genuine eloquence, masterly dialogue or description or reflexion, are mingled with leaden paragraphs wherein the author seems to be struggling under a burden too great for her strength.

The early novels then have the advantage of grace, spontaneity, and the charm exercised by a great writer when the great work is done without apparent effort. Like a giant wielding a club, George Eliot seems to execute the heavy tasks imposed by Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss with an ease possible only because there is a reserve of strength behind. But some of these early products of genius, and among them the most charming of all, could hardly be repeated. Has child-life ever been as delightfully represented in literature as in the first part of The Mill on the Floss? But one secret of the charm is that the book, especially in this part, is autobiographical. Again, in the Scenes of Clerical Life and in Adam Bede the writer moves easily among characters with whom she had been familiar from girlhood. The religious enthusiasm of Dinah Morris is partly a reminiscence of her own early feelings, and partly a picture of her aunt Elizabeth; while in Adam Bede, as afterwards in Caleb Garth, may be seen the features of her own father. In those early years George Eliot skimmed the cream of her experience. Like Scott, she began to write novels rather late. Her powers were therefore mature, and in her first books she combines the perfect freshness of a new writer with the weight and the range of an experienced one.

Thoughtfulness and serious purpose were from the start conspicuous in the writings of George Eliot. It is the overgrowth of these qualities, to the detriment of the artistic element, that mars her later works. Daniel Deronda is ruined by its philosophy and its didactic purpose. The style is ponderous and often clumsy, and the question of heredity is made too prominent. Middlemarch too shows signs of failure on the part of the artist. More than almost any other great novel, it sins against the law of unity. The stories of Dorothea and Casaubon and Ladislaw, of Lydgate and Rosamond, of the Garths, and of Bulstrode, are tacked together by the most flimsy external bonds. They all illustrate a single thesis; but it is for this, and not for their natural connexion, that they are chosen. The keynote of the whole novel is struck in the prelude; and, as in the case of the young Saint Theresa and her brother, we see throughout ‘domestic reality,’ in diverse shapes, meeting the idealist and turning him back from his great resolve. But even want of unity will be pardoned, provided the details are conceived and presented in the manner of an artist, as they are in Middlemarch. Some of George Eliot’s books contain fresher pictures than we find here, but none contains more that dwell in the mind, and in none is her maturest thought so well expressed. Middlemarch gives us one of the rarest things in literature, the philosophy of a powerful mind presented with all the charm of art. For this reason it at least rivals the best work of her first period.