Charlotte Brontë, we may remember, was declared, by her contemporaries, “one who has, for some sufficient reason, long forfeited the society of her sex”; and George Eliot herself was accused of “coarseness and immorality,” in her attempt “to familiarise the minds of our young women in the middle and higher ranks with matters on which their fathers and brothers would never venture to speak in their presence ... and to intrude on minds which ought to be guarded from impurity the unnecessary knowledge of evil.” To such critics her claim to kinship with the “honest old Dutchman” is set aside for a parallel to “the perverseness of our modern ‘pre-Raphaelites,’ with their choice of disagreeable subjects, uncomely models, and uncouth attitudes.”
Such is the natural result of women daring to think for themselves. To-day we are content rather to notice that Miss Burney first cleansed the circulating library, and Miss Austen most unobtrusively extolled the domestic virtues; while their sisters in art all contributed to the prevalence of wholesome fiction; until Miss Brontë and George Eliot stirred up the conscience of man towards woman. In reality women are born preachers, and always work for an ideal.
The period, indeed, is already approaching in which women’s work can no longer be treated en masse and by itself, apart from men’s. It is no longer essentially spontaneous or unconscious, as in Miss Burney and Jane Austen. We have described the writers immediately preceding George Eliot as professional experts, careful of art; and once the world had learnt to expect good work from woman and grown accustomed to her as an artist, there remained no further occasion for her to speak as a woman among aliens. George Eliot, indeed, like Charlotte Brontë, had been, by some of her contemporaries, taken for a man; but the youngest and most inexperienced reader to-day could scarcely have been momentarily deceived. There are, indeed, certain tricks, or mannerisms, of masculinity; but they are superficial, and not actually worn with much grace or skill.
No earlier woman-writer, indeed, had assumed so comprehensive a philosophy, or scarcely any attempt at ordered opinion on life in general, on character, or on faith. But, despite the enthusiasm of certain biographers, despite the influence—unquestioned—of Herbert Spencer, Strauss, George Henry Lewes, and others, we are not personally disposed to grant much weight to our author’s generalisations; while certainly the obtrusiveness of her moralising is an artistic blemish.
The fact is that George Eliot’s outlook remains thoroughly emotional and feminine. In herself, we know, she always saw life through a man-interpreter; and the didactics of her novels are derived from the study of books, not from the exercise of independent reason or thought. If she talked ethics, she felt faith.
But, on the other hand, her work has little external affinity with that of the women of genius preceding her (though it may be a natural development from theirs), because it is obviously the result of training and study, that is professional. It is, moreover, the first important contribution by women to the problem novel with a purpose. Both points can be easily illustrated by the most elementary comparison.
We have tacitly assumed, and with obvious justification in fact, that Fanny Burney and Jane Austen, for example, wrote entirely out of their own personal experience. We picture their own surroundings from the society in their novels, noting the power acquired by the limitation. Charlotte Brontë did not go beyond her own circle, save in imagination. But George Eliot, no less certainly, studied mankind for copy. It is true that she made more direct use of her own family and friends than they. Maggie Tulliver is no less autobiographical than Lucy Snowe. True also that for description and atmosphere she depended largely on memory. But even here the treatment is that of a self-conscious artist, composing and presenting from outside, studying effects, grouping types; always alive to a comparison between life and literature. And as she uses the human material which has come to her in the natural order of things, she increases it by the journalist’s eye for new copy, piquant contrast, and unexpected revelation. She invokes, moreover, the assistance of every literary device—prepared humour, scholarly style, cultured allusion, local colour, analytical characterisation, and dramatic construction. We have here no longer a spontaneous revelation of woman; rather her captain in full array, armed for fight.
Nor is the message, or open discussion of problems, less novel or less deliberate. It was possible, indeed inevitable, to notice in the earlier examples of woman’s work that she held theories on life not quite in accord with what man had always expected from her. Part of her inspiration, no doubt, was the desire to express these. On certain points, recognised womanly,—such as education and the ordering of a home,—she soon learnt to speak openly; but, in the main, we studied the woman’s ideal of character and conduct from her portrait-painting; we deduced her approval from her sympathy, her budding criticism from her scorn. If she attempted direct teaching, it was mostly in support of mere conventional duty; the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice, tentatively measured perhaps by a standard, not quite blindly copied from men. The greatest artists among women before Charlotte Brontë never obtruded the moral, discussed the problem.
But what was fearlessly urged on a few chosen topics from the Haworth parsonage became the foreground and main subject with the assistant editor of the Westminster Review. We are, to-day, somewhat overweighted with problem novels; but George Eliot was the first among us to realise the full power of fiction as a vehicle more persuasive, if not more powerful, than the pulpit; for the fearless and intimate discussion of all the questions and difficulties which must confront a man, or a woman, who is not content to accept things as they are, or to believe all he is told. To-day we may detect
“a curious naïveté in the whole impression George Eliot’s novels convey.... The ethical law is, in her universe, as all powerful as the law of gravitation, and as unavoidable. Remorse, degeneration of character, and even material loss, are meted out for transmission with the rigid and childlike sense of justice which animated the writers of the Old Testament. Her temper was Hebraistic, and goodness was more to her than beauty. It may be doubted whether in the world, as we see it, justice works as impartially and with such unmistakable exactitude, whether the righteous is never forsaken, and evil always hunts the wicked person to overthrow him.”