In George Eliot all the domestic animals are true neighbors and are brought within the Master's exhortation: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," by the tenderness and deep humor with which she treats them. This same Gyp, who is honored with first place among the characters described in the carpenter's shop, is continually doing something charming throughout Adam Bede. In Janet's Repentance dear old Mr. Jerome comes down the road on his roan mare, "shaking the bridle and tickling her flank with the whip as usual, though there was a perfect mutual understanding that she was not to quicken her pace;" and everywhere I find those touches of true sympathy with the dumb brutes, such as only earnest souls or great geniuses are capable of.
Somehow—I cannot now remember how—a picture was fastened upon my mind in childhood, which I always recall with pleasure: it is the figure of man emerging from the dark of barbarism attended by his friends the horse, the cow, the chicken and the dog. George Eliot's animal-painting brings always this picture before me.
In April, 1860, appeared George Eliot's second great novel, The Mill on the Floss. This book, in some respects otherwise her greatest work, possesses a quite extraordinary interest for us now in the circumstance that a large number of traits in the description of the heroine, Maggie Tulliver, are unquestionably traits of George Eliot herself, and the autobiographic character of the book has been avowed by her best friends. I propose, therefore, in the next lecture, to read some passages from The Mill on the Floss, in which I may have the pleasure of letting this great soul speak for herself with little comment from me, except that I wish to compare the figure of Maggie Tulliver, specially, with that of Aurora Leigh, in the light of the remarkable development of womanhood, both in real life and in fiction, which arrays itself before us when we think only of what we may call the Victorian women; that is, of the queen herself, Sister Dora, Florence Nightingale, Ida in Tennyson's Princess, Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte and her sisters, Mrs. Browning, with her Eve and Catarina and Aurora Leigh, and George Eliot, with her creations. I shall thus make a much more extensive study of The Mill on the Floss than of either of the four works which preceded it. It is hard to leave Adam Bede, and Dinah Morris and Bartle Massey, and Mrs. Poyser, but I must select; and I have thought this particularly profitable because no criticism that I have yet seen of George Eliot does the least justice to the enormous, the simply unique equipment with which she comes into English fiction, or in the least prepares the reader for those extraordinary revolutions which she has wrought with such demure quietness that unless pointed out by some diligent professional student, no ordinary observer would be apt to notice them. Above all have I done this because it is my deep conviction that we can find more religion in George Eliot's words than she herself dreamed she was putting there, and a clearer faith for us than she ever formulated for herself; a strange and solemn result, but one not without parallel; for Mrs. Browning's words of Lucretius in The Vision of Poets partly apply here:
"Lucretius, nobler than his mood!
Who dropped his plummet down the broad
Deep Universe, and said 'No God',
Finding no bottom! He denied
Divinely the divine, and died
Chief-poet on the Tiber-side
By grace of God! His face is stern
As one compelled, in spite of scorn,
To teach a truth he could not learn."
X.
While it is true that the publication of Adam Bede enables us—as stated in the last lecture—to fix George Eliot as already at the head of English novel writers in 1859, I should add that the effect of the book was not so well defined upon the public of that day. The work was not an immediate popular success; and even some of the authoritative critics, instead of recognizing its greatness with generosity, went pottering about to find what existing authors this new one had most likely drawn her inspiration from.
But The Mill on the Floss, which appeared in April, 1860, together with some strong and generous reviews of Adam Bede, which had meantime appeared in Blackwood's Magazine and in the London Times, quickly carried away the last vestige of this suspense, and The Mill on the Floss presently won for itself a popular audience and loving appreciation which appear to have been very gratifying to George Eliot herself. This circumstance alone would make the book an interesting one for our present special study; but the interest is greatly heightened by the fact—a fact which I find most positively stated by those who most intimately knew her—that the picture of girlhood which occupies so large a portion of the first part of the book, is, in many particulars, autobiographic. The title originally chosen for this work by George Eliot was Sister Maggie, from which we may judge the prominence she intended to give to the character of Maggie Tulliver. After the book was finished, however, this title was felt to be, for several reasons, insufficient. It was a happy thought of Mr. Blackwood's to call the book The Mill on the Floss; and George Eliot immediately adopted his suggestion to that effect. There is, too, a third reason why this particular work offers some peculiar contributions to the main lines of thought upon which these lectures have been built. As I go on to read a page here and there merely by way of recalling the book and the actual style to you, you will presently find that the interest of the whole has for the time concentrated itself upon the single figure of a little wayward English girl some nine years old, perhaps alone in a garret in some fit of childish passion, accusing the Divine order of things as to its justice or mercy, crudely and inarticulately enough yet quite as keenly after all as our Prometheus, either according to Æschylus or Shelley. As I pass along rapidly bringing back to you these pictures of Maggie's girlish despairs, I beg you to recall the first scenes which were set before you from the Prometheus, to bear those in mind along with these, to note how Æschylus—whom we have agreed to consider as a literary prototype, occupying much the same relation to his age as George Eliot does to ours—in stretching Prometheus upon the bare Caucasian rock and lacerating him with the just lightnings of outraged Fate, is at bottom only studying with a ruder apparatus the same phenomena which George Eliot is here unfolding before us in the microscopic struggles of the little English girl; and I ask you particularly to observe how, here, as we have so many times found before, the enormous advance from Prometheus to Maggie Tulliver—from Æschylus to George Eliot—is summed up in the fact that while personality in Æschylus' time had got no further than the conception of a universe in which justice is the organic idea, in George Eliot's time it has arrived at the conception of a universe in which love is the organic idea; and that it is precisely upon the stimulus of this new growth of individualism that George Eliot's readers crowd up with interest to share the tiny woes of insignificant Maggie Tulliver, while Æschylus, in order to assemble an interested audience, must have his Jove, his Titans, his earthquakes, his mysticism, and the blackness of inconclusive Fate withal.
Everyone remembers a sense of mightiness in this opening chapter of The Mill on the Floss, where the great river Floss, thick with heavy-laden ships, sweeps down to the sea by the red-roofed town of St. Ogg's. Remembering how we found that the first personality described in Adam Bede was that of a shepherd-dog, here, too, we find that the first prominent figures in our landscape are those of animals. The author is indulging in a sort of dreamy prelude of reminiscences, and in describing Dorlcote Mill, Maggie's home, says: