On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

What Balzac seems to have been struck with, from the first, in Evelina de Hanska, was her sincerity and oneness of purpose, the truth of her devotion to his work, and a certain similarity, an immediate sympathy, between his nature and hers. Much of his work, as he avows, has been done to strike the public—to provide the public with that without which it could scarcely accord him the attention he asked. But ‘certainly there are books in which I have loved to be myself; and you will know well which they are, for they are those in which my heart has spoken.’ When at length the two came together, at Neuchâtel in 1833—as in Vienna, and in Russian Poland itself, in later years—there was nothing, it seems, in either to diminish the interest or to break the spell. And the fascination continued. I have for my own part a little theory that the sympathy of the woman, her deep interest in his work, her participation in it (Séraphita and some kindred labour, whatever be its defects, would never have existed but for that influence of this mystic Northerner), gave the attachment, as far as Balzac was concerned, something of the features of an attachment of consolation. His early adoration, as I hold, his boyish passion, was for Madame de Berny. And, in maturer years, his ideal, his very dream of beauty and of charm, was Madame de Castries—Madame de Castries set, so to put it, in the best of her backgrounds: Madame de Castries at Aix-les-Bains. Never, I think, in Balzac’s life was that experience, or the force of it, equalled. But in Evelina de Hanska, whether as friend or wife, he discovered and obtained a steady rest—a rest the more assured, it may be, because she entertained for him feelings of a deeper devotion than any that were extended by that admirable and almost lifelong comrade, his friend, his sister’s friend, the blameless and the wise Madame Zulma Carraud.

An idealist, anyhow, Balzac was at the beginning; an idealist he remained to the end. The ‘amitiés d’épiderme,’ as he excellently called them, attracted him but little. In my short book about him, in the ‘Great Writers’ Series, I tried to show that what he sought for and obtained was the intimacy of the heart. Gautier knew this. And one-sided indeed must be those people—whether the word of their choice is intended for blame or for praise—who, judging either by life or work, think that Balzac is properly described as ‘materialist’ or ‘realist,’ alone or chiefly. The Real, which is not always the hideous, he was strong enough to face; yet Romance was essential to him. It is time, now, that the sentimental and soi-disant Romantic began to understand that in Balzac there were depths of feeling and of poetry to which they could never approach; and time also that those tiresome disciples of mere ugliness in literary theme and literary treatment, who account him their yet insufficient master, were informed, roundly, that whatever the lessons he may half-incidentally have taught them, nothing of Balzac’s greatness can ever fairly be claimed as supporting or justifying the narrow limitations of their sordid sect and creed.

(The Bookman, March 1894.)

GEORGE ELIOT

The accounts of George Eliot’s earlier life, which are in general circulation, are in some respects imaginary. ‘George Eliot’—Mary Ann Evans—was not the daughter of a poor clergyman, nor was she ever ‘adopted’ by a wealthy one. She was the daughter of a land surveyor in the Midland Counties, and was brought up at her father’s home, her mother dying when Mary Ann Evans was still a child. Nor was she ever the ‘pupil’ of Mr. Herbert Spencer, nor a frequent writer in the Westminster Review. She made the acquaintance and the friendship of Mr. Spencer when she was a woman, and already the mistress of the abstruse subjects in which she then chiefly delighted. She was for a time joint-editor of the Westminster with Dr. Chapman; but her writings in that Review were neither numerous nor generally important. After a residence of some years in Coventry—where she learned profoundly the features of the ‘Midlands,’ which she afterwards described—Mary Ann Evans came to London. At twenty-six years old she translated Strauss’s Life of Jesus, and seven years later, Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity; but her efforts at creative writing were wisely delayed. Her apprenticeship to Literature and Philosophy was elaborate and laborious; her training was extensive and deep. It was not until 1858 that Scenes of Clerical Life betrayed the presence of a new artist in Fiction—an artist of fresh gifts, but of undeveloped art.

The narratives of the ‘Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,’ of ‘Janet’s Repentance,’ and of ‘Mr. Gilfil’s Love-Story’—the Scenes of Clerical Life, in other words—impressed certain readers, and deserved to impress them; but not even the pathos of Mrs. Barton’s death would have given the writer lasting reputation had the book continued to stand alone. On re-perusal, the imperfections of its mechanism are too apparent; the novelist had not learned the art of proportion, nor the art of selection and rejection. Some little books, no bigger than the Scenes of Clerical Life, have been enough to secure for their authors an enduring fame. Nothing more than the Vicar of Wakefield could have been required to keep Goldsmith’s memory green. Sterne, desiring to be immortal, was under no obligation to write anything more, after he had written the Sentimental Journey. But the Scenes of Clerical Life, admirably fresh and spontaneous as they were, gave no such position to their author. It was not a young woman, but it was a woman young in her art, who was at work in them.

With Adam Bede it was otherwise. Adam Bede, published about the beginning of 1859, was seen at once to be more than a touching, and more than a popular, story. It was an achievement of complete art, and had the power of complete art, ‘to teach a truth obliquely,’ nor ‘wrong the thought’—as Mr. Browning has subtly put it—‘nor wrong the thought, missing the mediate word.’ It was at bottom a work of noble teaching. In it the novelist described with fidelity, but with poetic fidelity, scenes and characters the like of which she thoroughly knew; and the world recognised both the truth and the charm of the portrayal, and if it did not take to the young Squire, it took about equally to the two most strongly contrasted heroines that ever figured in one volume—to the preaching woman, Dinah Morris, with her exalted and patient spirit, and to the giddy Hetty, who had no virtue but the virtue of fascination.

It was chiefly to provincial society, or to the humbler society of the country-side, that George Eliot kept in her earlier works; and it was there that she was ever best. The elaborate Dutch painting of Silas Marner dealt sympathetically with the religious life of obscure sects; The Mill on the Floss portrayed the humours of the lower middle class, and gave us a delightful study of the passionate and lovable ‘Maggie’; Felix Holt dealt with country politics, though its best interest lay in the development of three wonderful characters—the agreeable Esther, the perplexed Felix, and the Dissenting minister who, in that old-world corner of England where the scene lay, had even in our own generation the dignity and quietude of an ancient Puritan emigrating beyond seas. Immense and always tender study of actual life was evident in these novels; and yet it did not require the publication of such a tour de force as Romola, which, in 1863, followed The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, to prove that the only novelist of quite the first rank who had arisen since Dickens and Thackeray was most powerful in work inspired by meditation and learning, rather than by observation, and that in that respect, as of course in many others, she differed absolutely from Dickens, whose strength lay in the observation of humanity, and from Thackeray, whose strength lay in the observation of ‘good society.’ If some works of George Eliot’s, of later date than Romola, remind us too often that their author, like the character in Faust, had schrecklich viel gelesen—that George Eliot was burdened with her learning—Romola is a conspicuous example of the ‘talent that forms itself,’ not exactly ‘in solitude,’ yet by profound and continuous meditation. Like all the greater works of its writer, it is a study of the heart. And in Romola the subtle wit of Italy is displayed, with curious variety of power, by a writer who had shown herself mistress, long before, of the blunter English humour.

But such a success as that of Romola—the success of an historical novelist for whom history is alive and is not a mere tradition, mere decorative background—is hardly to be made more than once. Romola may live at least as long as Esmond—in Esmond the tour de force is, if anything, more apparent; the machinery creaks sometimes yet more audibly in the working. In any case George Eliot did wisely to bring her imagination back to England, and to the shires ‘which we the heart of England well may call,’ and, having given us Felix Holt, to give us Middlemarch. Middlemarch, perhaps, has two faults as a work of art, but they are faults which evidence, at all events, the range of its writer’s mind. It is not properly one story, but several stories. The desire to put forth in a single colossal work—and Middlemarch is of the length of two three-volume novels—a picture of the whole of provincial life, touched at points, and disturbed, by the problems of our time, resulted in the creation of a book in which the many threads of narrative were often but slightly blended. Middlemarch is not a cabinet picture; it is a vast panorama. Again, in Middlemarch there was visible, for the first time in George Eliot’s career, some relaxation—or worse than relaxation—of literary style. Though on the whole it is justly allowed to be a noble piece of English writing, it is in expression less lucid and felicitous than the earlier novels; and the germs of a style charged too much with scientific similes are found to be of increased growth in Daniel Deronda. In George Eliot’s earliest fiction, though it was written in mature years, her art was not developed. In her latest, it was not concealed.

But between the two—between the Scenes of Clerical Life and Daniel Deronda—there lie some half-dozen romances, prolix, indeed, and dull at times, yet in some ways almost perfect in the most serious order of literary work. And, moreover, the presence of sheer mental power, the power chiefly of analysis and of synthesis, is almost as evident in Daniel Deronda as in the better fictions. The study of modern Jewish life and character in that formidable novel was of such a nature as to lead a leader of Jewish Society to pay a tribute to its knowledge and its sympathy. That study was directed, not only by insight, but by a continuous desire to do justice to the subject selected—to the minds chosen for dissection. The wide and deep interest in the fortunes of humanity, which characterised George Eliot, and which increased with her learning and her years—as her art somewhat declined—can never have been more apparent than in Daniel Deronda. The interest was sometimes, it is true, evidenced by way of an exalted pity; and seeing how removed that pity seemed from all that aroused it, the saying was remembered by certain critics that pity is akin to contempt. Those critics had understood George Eliot but superficially. All through her later works—and not in Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch alone—there is visible an increasing personal sense of the inevitableness of mistake, of a ‘waste of force’ in human life; and that gave to the labour of even this bright intellect a sadness which was scarcely bitterness at all.