At the time to which we have now brought her history, Marian Evans would seem to have been a singularly engaging person. She was small in stature and her face was what would be called plain here; but she was widely read, master of several languages, a good talker and listener: and beyond all, every current of testimony runs towards a certain intensity and loving fire which pervaded her and which endowed her with irresistible magnetic attraction for all sensitive souls that came near her. Her love for home matters, and for the spot of earth where she had been born, her gentle affection for animals; how the Bible and Thomas à Kempis were her favorite books, these and a thousand womanly traits I hope to bring out as we study some of her greater works,—for with all her reputed reserve I find scarcely any writer so sincerely communicative and so frankly desirous of sympathy on the part of her reader as George Eliot. In the next article I shall ask leave to present you with some pictures of the stage at which English novel-writing has arrived under the recent hands of Scott, Thackeray and Dickens when George Eliot is timidly offering her first manuscript to Blackwood's; and I shall then offer some quotations from these first three stories—particularly from Janet's Repentance which seems altogether the most important of the three—and shall attempt to show distinctly what were the main new features of wit, of humor, of doctrine, and of method which were thus introduced into literature, especially in connection with similar features which about this same time were being imparted by Mrs. Browning.
Meantime, let me conclude by asking you to fix your attention for a moment on this figure of Milly, sweet wife of Amos Barton, going to bed with her unmended basket of stockings in great fatigue, yet in great love and trust, and contrast it with that figure of Prometheus, nailed to the Caucasian rock in pain and hate, which formed the first object of these studies. What prodigious spiritual distance we have swept over from the Titan lying down, to unrest, thundering defiance against Jove's thunder, as if clashing shield against shield, and the tender-limbed woman whom the simple narrative puts before us in these words: "Her body was very weary, but her heart was not heavy ...; for her heart so overflowed with love," &c. Fixing your attention upon this word "love," and reminding you how, at the close of the last lecture, we found that the whole movement of the human spirit which we have traced here as the growth of personality towards the unknown—towards fellow-man—towards nature,—resulting in music, in the novel, in science—that this whole movement becomes a unity when we arrive at the fact that it really imparts a complete change in man's most ultimate conception of things—a change, namely, from the conception of Justice as the organic idea of moral order, a conception which we have seen Æschylus and Plato vainly working out to the outrageous conclusions of Prometheus, of the Republic; to the conception of Love as the organic idea of moral order, a conception which we are just now to see George Eliot working out to the divinely-satisfactory conclusion of Milly Barton, who conquers with gentle love a world which proved refractory alike to the justice of Jove and the defiance of Prometheus; reminding you, I say, of this concurrent change from feeble personality and justice to strong personality and love, what an amazing arc of progress we have traversed in coming from Æschylus to George Eliot!
And it is, finally, most interesting to find this change receiving clear expression, for the first time in English literature, in the works of the two women I have mentioned, Mrs. Browning and George Eliot. In this very autumn, when we have seen the editor of Blackwood's Magazine reading the MS. of George Eliot's first story to Thackeray, Mrs. Browning is sending Aurora Leigh to print; and, as I shall have frequent occasion to point out, the burden of Aurora Leigh as well as of George Eliot's whole cyclus of characters is love.
There is a charming scene in the first Act of Bayard Taylor's Prince Deukalion, which, though not extending to the height we have reached, yet very dramatically sums up a great number of ideas which converge towards it. In this scene Gæa, the Earth, mother of men, is represented as tenderly meditating upon her son, man. Near her stands a rose-tree, from one bud of which Love is presently to emerge. She says:
"I change with man,
Mother, not more than partner, of his fate.
Ere he was born I dreamed that he might be,
And through long ages of imperfect life
Waited for him. Then vexed with monstrous shapes,
That spawned and wallowed in primeval ooze,
I lay supine and slept, or dreamed to sleep;
And dreamed, or waking felt as in a dream,
Some touch of hands, some soft delivering help,
And he was there! His faint new voice I heard;
His eye that met the sun, his upright tread,
Thenceforth were mine! And with him came the palm,
The oak, the rose, the swan, the nightingale;
The barren bough hung apples to the sun;
Dry stalks made harvest: breezes in the woods
Then first found music, and the turbid sea
First rolled a crystal breaker to the shore.
His foot was on the mountains, and the wave
Upheld him: over all things huge and coarse
There came the breathing of a regal sway,
Which bent them into beauty. Order new
Followed the march of new necessity,
And what was useless, or unclaimed before,
Took value from the seizure of his hands."
In the midst of like thoughts, a bud on a rose which stands by Gæa bursts open, and Eros, the antique god of young love, appears from it.
gæa.
Blithe, tricksome spirit! art thou left alone
Of gods and all their intermediate kin
The sweet survivor? Yet a single seed,
When soil and seasons lend their alchemy,
May clothe a barren continent in green.
eros.
Was I born, that I should die?
Stars that fringe the outer sky
Know me: yonder sun were dim
Save my torch enkindle him.
Then, when first the primal pair
Found me in the twilight air,
I was older than their day,
Yet to them as young as they.
All decrees of fate I spurn;
Banishment is my return:
Hate and force purvey for me,
Death is shining victory.