GEORGE ELIOT
By MRS. LYNN LINTON

n this essay it is not intended to go into the vexed question of George Eliot's private life and character. Death has resolved her individuality into nothingness, and the discrepancy between her lofty thoughts and doubtful action no longer troubles us. But her work still remains as common property for all men to appraise at its true value—to admire for its beauty, to reverence for its teaching, to honour for its grandeur, yet at the same time to determine its weaknesses and to confess where it falls short of the absolute perfection claimed for it in her lifetime.

For that matter indeed, no one has suffered from unmeasured adulation more than has George Eliot. As a philosopher, once bracketed with Plato and Kant; as a novelist, ranked the highest the world has seen; as a woman, set above the law and, while living in open and admired adultery, visited by bishops and judges as well as by the best of the laity; her faults of style and method praised as genius—since her death she has been treated with some of that reactionary neglect which always follows on extravagant esteem. The mud-born ephemeridæ of literature have dispossessed her. For her profound learning, which ran like a golden thread through all she wrote till it became tarnished by pedantry, we have the ignorance which misquotes Lemprière and thinks itself classic. For her outspoken language and forcible diction, wherein, however, she always preserved so much modesty, and for her realism which described things and feelings as they are, but without going into revolting details, we have those lusciously suggestive epithets and those unveiled presentations of the sexual instinct which seem to make the world one large lupanar. For her accurate science and profound philosophy, we have those claptrap phrases which have passed into common speech and are glibly reproduced by facile parrots who do not understand and never could have created; and for her scholarly diction we have the tawdriness of a verbal ragbag where grammar is as defective as taste. Yet our modern tinselled dunces have taken the place of the one who, in her lifetime, was made almost oppressively great—almost too colossal in her supremacy.

But when all this rubbish has been thrown into the abyss of oblivion, George Eliot's works will remain solid and alive, together with Thackeray's, Scott's and Fielding's. Our Immortals will include in their company, as one of the "choir invisible" whose voice will never be stilled for man, the author of "Adam Bede" and "Romola," of the "Mill on the Floss" and "Middlemarch."

Her first essays in fiction, her "Scenes of Clerical Life," show the germs of her future greatness as well as the persistency of her aim. In "Janet's Repentance," which to our mind is the best of the three, those germs are already shaped to beauty. Nothing can be more delicately touched than the nascent love between Janet and Mr. Tryon. No more subtle sign of Janet's besetting sin could be given than by that candlestick held "aslant;" while her character, compounded of pride, timidity, affectionateness, spiritual aspiration and moral degradation, is as true to life as it was difficult to portray. It would be impossible to note all the gems in these three stories. We can indicate only one or two. That splendid paragraph in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story," beginning: "While this poor heart was being bruised"—the sharp summing up of Mr. Amos Barton's "middling" character—Lady Cheverel's silent criticisms contrasted with her husband's iridescent optimism—the almost Shakesperean humour of the men, the author's keen appraisement of the commonplace women; such aphorisms as Mrs. Linnet's "It's right enough to be speritial—I'm no enemy to that—but I like my potatoes meally;"—these and a thousand more, eloquent, tender, witty, deep, make these three stories masterpieces in their way, despite the improbability of the Czerlaski episode in "Amos Barton" and the inherent weakness of the Gilfil plot. We, who can remember the enthusiasm they excited when they first appeared in Blackwood's Magazine, on re-reading them in cooler blood can understand that enthusiasm, though we no longer share its pristine intensity. It was emphatically a new departure in literature, and the noble note of that religious feeling which is independent of creed and which touches all hearts alike, woke an echo that even to this day reverberates though in but a poor, feeble and attenuated manner.