General Characteristics.—George Eliot is more strictly modern in spirit than either of the other two great contemporary novelists. This spirit is exhibited chiefly in her ethical purpose, her scientific sympathies, and her minute dissection of character.
Her writings manifest her desire to benefit human beings by convincing them that nature's laws are inexorable, and that an infraction of the moral law will be punished as surely as disobedience to physical laws. She strives to arouse people to a knowledge of hereditary influences, and to show how every deed brings its own results, and works, directly or indirectly, toward the salvation or ruin of the doer. She throws her whole strength into an attempt to prove that joy is to be found only in strict attendance upon duty and in self-renunciation. In order to carry home these serious lessons of life, she deals with powerful human tragedies, which impart a somberness of tone to all her novels. In her early works she treats these problems with artistic beauty; but in her later books she often forgets the artist in the moralist, and uses a character to preach a sermon.
The analytical tendency is pronounced in George Eliot's works, which exhibit an exhaustive study of the feelings, the thoughts, the dreams, and purposes of the characters. They become known more through description than through action.
A striking characteristic of her men and women is their power to grow. They do not appear ready-made and finished at the beginning of a story, but, like real human beings amid the struggles of life, they change for the better or the worse. Tito Melema in Romola is an example of her skill in evolving character. At the outset, he is a beautiful Greek boy with a keen zest for pleasure. His selfishness, however, which betrays itself first in ingratitude to his benefactor, leads step by step to his complete moral degradation. The consequences of his deeds entangle him finally in such a network of lies that he is forced to betray "every trust that was reposed in him, that he might keep himself safe."
George Eliot occasionally brightens the seriousness of her works with humor. Her stories are not permeated with joyousness, like those of Dickens, nor do they ripple with quiet amusement, like the novels of Thackeray; but she puts witty and aphoristic sayings into the conversations of the characters. The scene at the "Rainbow" inn is bristling with mother wit. Mr. Macey observes:—
"'There's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell if the bell could hear itself.'"[11]
Great precision and scholarlike correctness mark the style of George Eliot. Her vocabulary, though large, is too full of abstract and scientific terms to permit of great flexibility and idiomatic purity of English. She is master of powerful figures of speech, original, epigrammatic turns of expression, and, sometimes, of a stirring eloquence.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 1850-1894
[Illustration: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. From a photograph.]
Life.—By preferring romantic incident to the portrayal of character, Stevenson differed from his great Victorian predecessors in the field of fiction. He was born in 1850 in the romantic city of Edinburgh, which he has described so well in his Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh. Being an invalid from early childhood, he was not sent regularly to school; yet he was ready at the age of seventeen to enter Edinburgh University. He says of himself that in college he neglected all the studies that did not appeal to him, to read with avidity English poetry and fiction, Scottish legend and history. During his summer vacations he worked at lighthouse engineering. The out-of-door life was just what he liked; but the office work was irksome to him. When finally he made his dislike known, his father, although bitterly disappointed at his son's aversion to the calling followed by two generations of Stevensons, nevertheless consented to a change; and they compromised on the law. In 1875 Stevenson succeeded in gaining admission to the bar; but he soon realized that he would never feel at home in this profession. Moreover, he had always wanted to be a writer. He says:—