"There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears; who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society much as the son of Imlah came before the throned kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital—a mien as dauntless and as daring. Is the satirist of Vanity Fair admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek-fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time, they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.
"Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognized; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day: as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things."
Now, into this field of beneficent activity which The Novel has created, comes in 1857 George Eliot: comes with no more noise than that of a snow-flake falling on snow, yet—as I have said, and as I wish now to show with some detail—comes as an epoch-maker, both by virtue of the peculiar mission she undertakes and of the method in which she carries it out.
What then is that peculiar mission?
In the very first of these stories, Amos Barton, she announces it quite explicitly, though it cannot be supposed at all consciously. Before quoting the passage, in order that you may at once take the full significance of it, let me remind you of a certain old and grievous situation as between genius and the commonplace person. For a long time every most pious thinker must have found one of the mysteries most trying to his faith to be the strange and apparently unjustifiable partiality of God's spiritual gifts as between man and man.
For example, we have a genius (say) once in a hundred years; but this hundred years represents three generations of the whole world; that is to say, here are three thousand million commonplace people to one genius.
Now, with all the force of this really inconceivable numerical majority, the cry arises, How monstrous! Here are three thousand millions of people to eat, sleep, die, and rot into oblivion, and but one man is to have such faculty as may conquer death, win fame, and live beyond the worms!
Now, no one feels this inequality so keenly as the great genius himself. I find in Shakspeare, in Beethoven, in others, often an outcrop of feeling which shows that the genius cringes under this load of favoritism, as if he should cry in his lonesome moments, Dear Lord, why hast thou provided so much for me, and so little for yonder multitude? In plain fact, it seems as if there was never such a problem as this: what shall we do about these three thousand millions of common men as against the one uncommon man, to save the goodness of God from seeming like the blind caprice of a Roman Emperor!
It is precisely here that George Eliot comes to the rescue; and though she does not solve the problem—no one expects to do that—at any rate she seems to me to make it tolerable, and to take it out of that class of questions which one shuts back for fear of nightmare and insanity. Emerson has treated this matter partially and from a sort of side-light. "But," he exclaims in the end of his essay on The Uses of Great Men, "great men,—the word is injurious. Is there caste? Is there fate? What becomes of the promise to virtue?... Why are the masses, from the dawn of history down, food for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few leaders, ... and they make war and death sacred; but what for the wretches whom they hire and kill? The cheapness of man is everyday's tragedy." And more to this purport. But nothing could be more unsatisfactory than Emerson's solution of the problem. He unhesitatingly announces on one page that the wrong is to be righted by giving every man a chance in the future, in (say) different worlds; every man is to have his turn at being a genius; until "there are no common men." But two pages farther on this elaborate scheme of redress is completely swept away by the announcement that after all the individual is nothing, the quality is what abides, and so falls away in that singular delusion of his, that personality is to die away into the first cause.
On the other hand, if you will permit me to quote a few pathetic words which I find in Carlyle's Reminiscences, in the nature of a sigh and aspiration, and breathed blessing all in one upon his wife and her ministrations to him during that singular period of his life when he suddenly left London and buried himself in his wild Scotch farm of Craigenputtoch, I shall be able to show you how Carlyle, most unconsciously, dreams toward a far more satisfactory end of this matter than Emerson's, and then how George Eliot actually brings Carlyle's dream to definite form, and at last partial fulfilment in the very beginning of her work. Carlyle is speaking of the rugged trials and apparent impossibilities of living at Craigenputtoch when he and his Jeanie went there, and how bravely and quietly she faced and overcame the poverty, the ugliness, the almost squalor, which was their condition for a long time. "Poverty and mean obstruction continued," he says, "to preside over it, but were transformed by human valor of various sorts into a kind of victory and royalty. Something of high and great dwelt in it, though nothing could be smaller and lower than many of the details. How blessed might poor mortals be in the straitest circumstances, if only their wisdom and fidelity to Heaven and to one another were adequately great! It looks to me now like a kind of humble russet-coated epic, that seven years' settlement at Craigenputtoch, very poor in this world's goods, but not without an intrinsic dignity greater and more important than then appeared; thanks very mainly to her, and her faculties and magnanimities, without whom it had not been possible."