But we must remember that George Eliot’s conception of wickedness, if limited, was well in advance of her age; that she understood temptation, and could draw a most dramatically “mixed” character. Her people are not all black or all white. She knew how slight an error or slip, how amiable a weakness, could lead to actions which the Pharisee called sin, and the Puritan would punish with hell-fire. She entirely forgave Maggie Tulliver, she held out the hand of fellowship to Godfrey Cass, and even to Arthur Donnithorne. If “we are almost afraid of” Dinah Morris, she, too, certainly loved sinners. George Eliot, in fact, will not accept any opinion on authority, or follow the world in judgment; and if “the world has never produced a woman philosopher,” her work remains pre-eminent as the first complete and outspoken record of woman’s “scientific speculation to discover an interpretation of the universe,” her first conscious message to mankind; destined to “raise the standard of prose-fiction to a higher power; to give it a new impulse and motive.” She has now spoken for herself on conduct and on faith.
Nevertheless George Eliot remains a woman. We still look to her primarily for the revelation of woman, and woman’s vision of man. We have taken another step, onward and inward, towards the mystery of the feminine ideal, the meaning of the Home and the Family to those who make it. All this is far more complex, indeed, than anything we have studied in earlier chapters. It embraces, in Romola, some reconstruction of past times; in Daniel Deronda, some study of an alien race. It includes sympathy for a woman wandering so far from the natural feminine instincts as to abandon, and half murder, her own child; for a girl who, given to dreamy ideals and passionate self-sacrifice, will yet suffer attentions from the acknowledged lover of her cousin, simply because he is handsome. It reveals the genuine repentance and uplifting of a drunken wife; it permits “friendship” between a married woman and a young artist whose very vices are more attractive than the heartless tyrannical egoism of her husband. We have travelled a long way, certainly, from Catherine Morland and Fanny Price. We can imagine a new Lydia Bennet under George Eliot.
Still the problems are women’s problems: the solutions are feminine, as we may see from the eagerness with which they were condemned by man, the conservative and the conventional. “I’m no denyin’,” said Mrs. Poyser, “the women are foolish. God almighty made ’em to match the men.” It was George Eliot’s ambition, towards which she accomplished much, that “the women” should be less intent upon that matching, more willing, and able, to mould themselves after their own pattern: in their turn to form a creed, to establish a standard—wherein she was following, but more consciously, those who had gone before. As Huxley remarked, in answer to Princess Louise, she did not “go in for” the superiority of women. She rather “teaches the inferiority of men.”
For, verily, there is no more in it. Her women are lost outside the home; they are not financially, or intellectually, “independent.” They have no professions, no clubs, no sports. Their interests are confined to religion, domesticity, and love. Nor does George Eliot attempt to follow “the men” into politics[15] or business, on to the cricket field or the parade ground. A soldier is distinguished by his regimentals, a scholar by his library, a doctor by his gig. She has a strong partiality, tempered by criticism, for the clergy; she can distinguish, intelligently, between Church and Dissent; she knows a good deal about squires and farmers; she loves the labourer. We may safely regard her work as the continuation, and the completion, of our subject.
The completion, indeed, is rather intellectual than artistic. She covers the whole ground, as none of her predecessors had attempted; she makes the last final addition of subject by discovering, and facing, social problems; she applies the last word in literary professionalism; but inasmuch as her characters are more typical and more studied than Jane Austen’s, they are, in a sense, less modern and less universal. We may learn more from her about women, and women’s opinions; but these are the women of one age only—fast awakening, indeed, and conscious of many troubling possibilities, but not free.
Their chief aim is, while widening their knowledge and sympathy, to speak with imperious accents of duty, that “stern Daughter of the Voice of God.” Despite her assumption of masculine logic and reasoning, itself an artistic blemish, she offers no explanation of her categorical and materialistic, ethical dogma. The distinction between good and evil with her is in the last resort a question of emotional instinct, haunted by “the faltering hope that a spiritual interpretation of the universe may be true.” It is impossible to avoid feeling that she accords the greatest strength of character to serene piety like that of Dinah Morris, or to Adam Bede’s conception of the “deep, spiritual things in religion ... when feelings come into you like a rushing, mighty wind.... His work, as you know, had always been part of his religion, and from very early days he saw clearly that good carpentry was God’s will.” In her heart of hearts, George Eliot, we are certain, would have echoed Mrs. Poyser’s preference for character over doctrine: “Mr. Irvine was like a good meal o’ victual, you were the better for him without thinking on it; and Mr. Ryde was like a dose o’ physic, he gripped you and worrited you, and, after all, he left you much the same.”
It was Mr. Irvine, you will remember, who put on his slippers before going upstairs to his plain, invalid sister; and “whoever remembers how many things he has declined to do even for himself, rather than have the trouble of putting on or taking off his boots, will not think this last detail insignificant.” It needs a woman, however, to appreciate such a service of love.
George Eliot, indeed, could be humorous, somewhat pedantically, and even genial about little things, and she recognised most fully their importance in life. But her more calculated and accumulative effects were all tragic or subdued melancholy; partly, no doubt, from this uncertainty of hers about faith and her passionate sense of justice, so relentless in its demand for the punishment of sin; partly also from that tinge of sadness which overshadows the narrow, old-fashioned dogma by which her own childhood was moulded. Hard as she strove for intellectual freedom, and eagerly as she proclaimed independence of judgment, the halter of early impressions was round her neck; and it is only by dwelling upon incidents or individuals, and ignoring the studied main motive, that we can gain from her work any of the joy in physical or natural beauty which should be an artist’s first care to impart.
Yet, after all, nature has triumphed over temperament. In reality, for example, Dinah Morris lives for us in her tactful tenderness for the querulous old Lisbeth, and in her yearning towards Hetty; not in the “call,” the “leading,” and the “voices” by which her ministry was inspired. On the other hand, we admire her dignified superiority to masculine criticism of women’s preaching: “It isn’t for men to make channels for God’s Spirit, as they make channels for the water-courses, and say, ‘Flow here, but flow not there.’”
Hetty Sorrel, again, was only adventurous through misfortune; she belongs to the fireside. Dorothea was a hero-worshipper; Maggie Tulliver is the ideal sister; Mary Garth the ideal helpmate. The crimes of Rosamond Vincy, if there be no mercy in their exposure, are wholly domestic; the sins of Janet are committed for her husband.