It is the same with the men. Amos Barton is only a poor country clergyman, and grey-haired Mr. Gilfil “filled his pocket with sugar-plums for the little children.” Adam Bede “had no theories about setting the world to rights,” and “couldn’t abide a fellow who thought he made himself fine by being coxy to’s betters.” The Tullivers, father and son, were, in their different ways, as fine specimens of honest tradesmen as Bulstrode was a consummate hypocrite of the provinces. Lydgate was no more than an exceptionally clever and cultured general practitioner, and we fancy that Will Ladislaw was a better lover than artist. George Eliot’s squires are typical ornaments of the countryside; her farmers belong as permanently to one side of the hearth as their wives to the other. Silas Marner, practising a trade that could not “be carried on entirely without the help of the Evil One,” since “all cleverness was in itself suspicious,” had no power of filling his life with “movement, mental activity, and close fellowship” outside the “narrow religious sect” in which his youth was passed.

Nancy Osgood “actually said ‘mate’ for ‘meat,’ ‘’appen’ for ‘perhaps,’ and ‘’oss’ for ‘horse,’ which, to young ladies living in good Lytherly society, who habitually said ’orse, even in domestic privacy, and only said ’appen on the right occasions, was necessarily shocking.” She supported “a cheerful face under rough answers and unfeeling words by the belief that ‘a man must have so much on his mind’”; and “had her unalterable code” ready for all occasions.

They are not an heroic company, you perceive, these sons and daughters of a highly intellectual woman-novelist. In its more primitive exponents their “kindness” is “of a beery and bungling sort,” their anger is brutal and bigoted; they are not really interested in general principles, in psychological analysis, in refined passion, or in the future of mankind. Yet they are very serious about life, a good deal puzzled by the apparent injustice of God, and filled with love or hatred towards all their neighbours. In this parish, as in most, everyone knows all about everyone else’s affairs, and finds them of supreme interest.

Thus George Eliot maintains the feminine attention to minutiæ; the woman’s centralisation of Life round the family. She has acquired knowledge, “read up” literature, and to some extent digested philosophy; but she applies her powers, her culture, and her training—from practice and association with professional writers—to the amplification and rounding off of woman’s art. She established domestic realism by the expression of feminine insight. She is content to leave other things to other pens. The appearance of generalisations not influenced by her sex is misleading. It is only a modern form of the old story. Her heart, and her genius, are those of a woman, womanly.

Scenes of Clerical Life, 1858.
Adam Bede, 1859.
The Mill on the Floss, 1860.
Silas Marner, 1861.
Romola, 1863.
Felix Holt, 1866.
Middlemarch, 1872.
Daniel Deronda, 1876.

FOOTNOTES:

[15] Felix Holt is a possible, but not a successful, exception.

THE GREAT FOUR

Before completing our general conclusions as to the aim and achievement of women’s work, it may be well to institute certain comparisons between the four writers of genius around whom we have chronicled our record of progress; to estimate the ground covered by their work; to analyse their ideals, witnessing change and development.

Although, as we have seen, all primarily domestic, if not actually parochial, the middle-class, “set” as a subject by Richardson, became—more or less consciously—subdivided in their hands. Fanny Burney confined herself, almost without reserve, to studies of town life, with an occasional digression to fashionable health resorts. It is true that her heroines may sigh for a sylvan glade or dream of green fields: no woman of sensibility could do less. In their minds the country must inevitably be allied to virtue and content. But we cannot pretend that the rural scenes of Camilla are drawn from nature; and Miss Burney was, undoubtedly, most at home in the drawing-room, at the assembly, in the opera-house, or at the baths. Nowhere else can we find so vivid and lifelike a picture of Society in the eighteenth century—the dramatic contrast with “Commerce at play” recalling Vanity Fair. It is here, in fact, that Miss Burney’s exceptional personal experience gave her the enviable opportunity of drawing both Mayfair and Holborn at first hand. She is specifically Metropolitan, though we should not say Cockney. In her imagination there is no world outside London, no higher ambition than notoriety about Town.