“So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one’s efforts, there is reason to dread. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....
“It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings; which lofty-minded people despise. I find a source of delicious sympathy in these faithful pictures of a monotonous, homely existence, which has been the fate of so many more among my fellow-mortals than a life of pomp or of absolute indigence, of tragic suffering or of world-stirring actions. I turn, without shrinking, from cloud-borne angels, from prophets, sibyls, and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened perhaps by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning wheel, and her stone jug, and all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her; or I turn to that village wedding, kept between four brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens the dance with a high-shouldered, broad-faced bride, while elderly and middle-aged friends look on, with very irregular noses and lips, and probably with quart-pots in their hands, but with an expression of unmistakable contentment and good-will....
“All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our houses.... Paint us an angel if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any æsthetic rules which shall banish from the region of art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pothouse, those rounded backs and stupid, weather-worn faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world—those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions....
“There are few prophets in the world, few sublimely beautiful women, few heroes. I can’t afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my everyday fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. Neither are picturesque lazzaroni or romantic criminals half so frequent as your common labourer, who gets his own bread, and eats it vulgarly but creditably with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely-assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers; more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at some trait of gentle goodness in the faulty people who sit at the same hearth with me, or in the clergyman of my own parish, who is perhaps rather too corpulent, and in other respects is not an Oberlin or a Tillotson, than at the deeds of heroes whom I shall never know except by hearsay, or at the sublimest abstract of all clerical graces that was ever conceived by an able novelist.”
Woman has found, and proclaimed, her mission. She is a moral realist, and her realism is not inspired by any idle ideal of art, but by sympathy with life. Jane Austen and Mary Mitford were compared, condescendingly, with Dutch painters. George Eliot claims the parallel with pride. It may be questioned if realism was ever defended with so much eloquence, from such high motives. Finally, if the romance of high life has no place in these pictures, neither has the romance of crime, adventure, or squalid destitution. They hold up the mirror to mediocrity. They present the parish.
And for many years George Eliot influenced thought and culture among the middle-classes more widely, and perhaps more profoundly, than any other writer. We can remember a generation for whom the moral problems involved in the relations between Dorothea and Will Ladislaw were a favourite topic for tea-table conversation in serious families; and when the novelist herself married a second time, it seemed to many that an ideal had been desecrated. Her intensity of religious feeling, combined with independence towards theological authority, expressed with truly artistic effect the whole temperament of an age whose spiritual cravings were almost exclusively ethical. Her contribution to literature, placing her in the highest rank, was the creation of many characters, instinct with humanity, struggling with fine moral earnestness towards the attainment of an ideal, halting long and stumbling often by the way. Their appeal to young readers of each generation is irresistible; while the crowded backgrounds, so truthfully and dramatically portrayed, of a day when the English middle-classes were ever eager in extending their moral and mental horizon, can never lose value as an important chapter in social history.
If we have read them rightly, it is this for which women’s work had been all along preparing the way. George Eliot certainly had not so great a genius as Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë; she was not a pioneer like Fanny Burney. But she had greater breadth, more firm solidity; and she was conscious of her aim, with the professional training, the culture, and the genius to achieve.
Women, we see, have been always realistic and parochial. They have avoided the glitter of wealth and the grime of sin. Tender to prodigals, they have loved the home. If the “intense and continuous note of personal conviction,” so conspicuous in George Eliot, began with Charlotte Brontë, women have always felt and thought morally.
She has been summarily dismissed as an “example of the way in which the novel—once a light and frivolous thing—had come to be taken with the utmost seriousness—had in fact ceased to be light literature at all, and began to require rigorous and elaborate training and preparation in the writer, perhaps even something of the athlete’s processes in the reader.”
But such seriousness was characteristic of her age, and everyone had then learnt to demand professionalism in art; while, on the other hand, readers of 1821 were assured that “Miss Austen had the merit of being evidently a Christian writer,” who conveyed “that unpretending kind of instruction which is furnished by real life,” and whose works may “on the whole be recommended, not only as among the most unexceptionable of their kind, but as combining, in an eminent degree, instruction with amusement.”