'I don't know. I'm an American boy,' said the child.
'I see you are one of the best!' laughed Winterbourne.
'Are you an American man?' pursued this vivacious infant. And then on Winterbourne's affirmative reply,—'American men are the best,' he declared."
On the other hand compare this intense, dark-eyed Maggie in her garret and with her flaming ways, with Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh." Aurora Leigh, too, has her garret, and doubtless her intensity too, blossoms in that congenial dark and lonesomeness. I read a few lines from Book 1st by way of reminder.
"Books, books, books!
I had found the secret of a garret-room
Piled high with cases in my father's name
... Where, creeping in and out
Among the giant fossils of my past
Like some small nimble mouse between the ribs
Of a mastodon, I nibbled here or there
At this or that box, pulling through the gap
In heats of terror, haste, victorious joy,
The first book first. And how I felt it beat
Under my pillow in the morning's dark,
An hour before the sun would let me read!
My books! At last, because the time was ripe,
I chanced upon the poets."
And here, every reader of The Mill on the Floss will remember how, at a later period, Maggie chanced upon Thomas à Kempis at a tragic moment of her existence; and it is fine to see how in describing situations so alike, the purely elemental differences between the natures of Mrs. Browning and George Eliot project themselves upon each other.
The scene in George Eliot concerning Maggie and Thomas à Kempis is too long to repeat here, but everyone will recall the sober, analytic, yet altogether vital and thrilling picture of the trembling Maggie, as she absorbs wisdom from the sweet old mediæval soul. But, on the other hand, Mrs. Browning sings it out, after this riotous melody:
"As the earth
Plunges in fury when the internal fires
Have reached and pricked her heart,
And throwing flat
The marts and temples—the triumphal gates
And towers of observation—clears herself
To elemental freedom—thus, my soul,
At poetry's divine first finger-touch,
Let go conventions and sprang up surprised,
Convicted of the great eternities
Before two worlds.
But the sun was high
When first I felt my pulses set themselves
For concord; when the rhythmic turbulence
Of blood and brain swept outward upon words,
As wind upon the alders, blanching them
By turning up their under-natures till
They trembled in dilation. O delight
And triumph of the poet who would say
A man's mere 'yes,' a woman's common 'no,'
A little human hope of that or this,
And says the word so that it burns you through
With special revelation, shakes the heart
Of all the men and women in the world
As if one came back from the dead and spoke,
With eyes too happy, a familiar thing
Become divine i' the utterance!"
I have taken special pleasure in the last sentence of this outburst, because it restates with a precise felicity at once poetic and scientific, but from a curiously different point of view, that peculiar function of George Eliot which I pointed out as appearing in the very first of her stories, namely, the function of elevating the plane of all commonplace life into the plane of the heroic by keeping every man well in mind of the awful ego within him which includes all the possibilities of heroic action. Now this is what George Eliot does, in putting before us these humble forms of Tom and Maggie, and the like: she says these common "yes" and "no" in terms of Tom and Maggie; and yet says them so that this particular Tom and Maggie burn you through with a special revelation—though one has known a hundred Maggies and Toms before. Thus we find the delight and triumph of the poetic and analytic novelist, George Eliot, precisely parallel to this delight and triumph of the more exclusively poetic Mrs. Browning, who says a man's mere "yes," a woman's common "no," so that it shakes the hearts of all the men and women in the world, etc. Aurora Leigh continues: