o George Eliot will always have to be assigned a prominent place in the history of the literature of the nineteenth century as a foremost novelist, poet, and social philosopher.
Mary Ann, or, as she subsequently spelt her Christian name, Marian, Evans was born at South Farm, a mile from Griff, in the parish of Calton in Warwickshire, on November 22d, 1819. Her father, the prototype of Adam Bede, was Robert Evans, of Welsh origin; who started life as a carpenter, but soon became a land agent in Warwickshire. This position implies great responsibilities, and demands thorough business capacities as well as firmness and trustworthiness of character, in his relations to his employers as well as his subordinates. He was intrusted with the management of the extensive estates of five great noblemen and land-owners in the county of Warwickshire. He was thus a man of considerable importance and power in the country, and would hold a social position ranking with the highest professional classes of the neighborhood.
This position of her father gave her the opportunity of gaining considerable insight into the lives and characters of English people of every class in the country, and from its neutral height between the great landlord and the farmer, down to the farm laborer, she could command the horizon line of all these lives, realize their habits, their aspirations and sufferings, and command its extent as well as its limitations. The country, the fields, the garden about Griff House, where her childhood was spent, as well as the village with its inhabitants,—with whom, through her mother as well as her father, she came in contact,—all stimulated her loving and sympathetic observation and formed that background of experience in the youthful mind, out of which subsequently rose, with strong spontaneity and truthful precision of design, the characters and scenes of her novels. They will ever remain the classical expositions of English provincial life in literature. The upright strength and pertinacity of her characters, as well as the insight into practical life and the life of men, were no doubt derived from her father, and from the intimate intercourse with him for so many years of the most important formative period of her life.
Her mother was a housewife of the old-fashioned type, whose health was always poor, and who died when Marian was about fifteen years of age. She is supposed to be portrayed in Mrs. Hackit in 'Amos Barton.' She seems to have been a woman with ready wit, a somewhat sharp tongue, an undemonstrative but tender-hearted nature. In many respects she seems also to have been the model for that masterpiece of character-drawing, Mrs. Poyser. Though Marian had two sisters, her brother Isaac Evans was her playmate. The youthful relation between brother and sister was very much like that of Tom Tulliver and Maggie in 'The Mill on the Floss,'—no doubt the most autobiographical of her novels, as regards at least the drawing of Maggie's character.
Marian was at first sent to a school at the neighboring Nuneaton; and at a very early age she taught at Sunday school,—which may have instilled a magisterial bias into her mind from the very outset. At the age of twelve she proceeded to a school at Coventry, kept by the Misses Franklin, which enjoyed considerable reputation in the neighborhood. She remained in this school for three years; beyond elementary school duties she devoted much time to English composition, French and German. Her life was then rather solitary, moved by strong inner religious convictions, upon which she dwelt with passionate fervor. Her religious views were at first simply those of the Church of England, then those of the Low Church, and then became "anti-supernatural." The second phase was no doubt strongly influenced by her aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, the "Derbyshire Methodist," the prototype of Dinah Morris in 'Adam Bede.' The earnest, almost lugubrious conception of life which she formed in these times, and which subsequent years and experiences only intensified, no doubt gave the keynote to her whole temperament and genius. It produced in her that supreme development of the idea of duty and compassion for human suffering which elevates the tone of her writing with a lofty conception of life, enables her to penetrate into the feelings and aspirations of all classes, and while it widened the range of her sympathy, never did so at the cost of genuineness or intensity of feeling. At the same time this serious keynote, though it was not opposed to humor,—the growth of which it even favored,—led to some limitations in the harmonious development of her artistic nature; notably in that it counteracted the sense for the playful and joyous side of life. The eternal conflict between Hellenism and Hebraism, between the vine-wreath and the crown of thorns, was not reconciled by her, but led to the suppression or defeat of Hellenism. The true, the joyous spirit of Hellenism, with its ideals of beauty and happiness in life, never really possessed her soul. In her own words she has put this eternal dualism:—
"For evermore
With grander resurrection than was feigned
Of Attila's fierce Huns, the soul of Greece
Conquers the bulk of Persia. The maimed form
Of calmly joyous beauty, marble-limbed,
Yet breathing with the thought that shaped its limbs,
Looks mild reproach from out its opened grave
At creeds of terror; and the vine-wreathed god
Fronts the pierced Image with the crown of thorns."
Only in the tragic manifestation of the Greek mind, above all in an Æschylus, did she find true resonance to the passionate beats of her God-loving and world-renouncing heart. Yet more and more, as her mind grew and severed itself from the traditional beliefs of her childhood,—with which however she ever remained in deepest sympathy,—did this love of God and renunciation of the world mean the love of man and the tolerance of weakness, the pity with suffering and the active effort to help to rectify and to improve. The one element in Hellenism which she adopted and clung to, and which as a supporting wall she added to the whole structure of her more Hebraistic beliefs and ideals, was the worship of Sanity. This worship only intensified the tolerance of the unsound, the pity for the diseased and distorted and miserable. And though she never became a professed Positivist, it was no doubt the response which Comte's philosophy gave to these cravings that made his views ultimately most congenial to her.
The true and independent development of her mind began when after the death of her mother she took charge of Griff House for her father; but especially when in 1841 her father retired from his active duties, and settled at Foleshill near Coventry. It was here, while taking lessons in Latin and Greek from Mr. Sheepshanks, and also devoting herself to music, that she formed the friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Charles Bray of Coventry and their kinsman Mr. Charles C. Hennell, the Unitarian philosopher and writer. These people, deeply interested in philosophy and literature, and important contributors to the philosophico-religious literature of the day, responded fully to the mental needs of George Eliot. Out of this intellectual affinity grew a friendship which lasted through life. They also introduced her to the philosophical and critical literature of Germany, and it was through them that she began in 1843 her first literary task, the translation of David Strauss's 'Life of Jesus,' which had been begun by Miss Brabant, who became Mrs. Charles Hennell. The task of translating Strauss's great work, which occupied three years of her life, was followed by work of the same nature, which, though not as taxing as the life of Christ, must still have called upon thought and perseverance to a high degree: it was 'The Essence of Christianity,' by the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. These works, which stand on the border line between philosophy and religion, led her by a natural development into the domain of pure philosophy; so that the next more extensive task which she undertook, but to our knowledge never completed, was a translation of Spinoza's 'Ethics.'
She was now fairly, at the age of twenty-seven, launched in her literary career; though as yet it was on the side of science and religion and not of art. The essays which belong to the following period, together with her editorial occupation, again formed a transition from the more scientific character of her writing to the domain of pure literature. And though these works belong to the field of criticism, it was criticism as applied to pure literature, fiction, and biography, and thus brought her inherently ponderous and theoretical mind, by natural stages, from analysis and speculation to the more imaginative sphere of synthesis and creation. This early theoretical and scientific direction of her occupation and thought may have produced that fault in her later writing with which she has often been reproached,—it may have made her style and diction clumsy and pedantic. On the other hand, it was a most excellent training for the future writer of even fiction. For it exercised the mind in gaining full mastery over thought; in recognizing and defining the nicest and most delicate shadings of meaning and of expression; in insisting upon their logical sequence, and thus impressing upon the author the rudiments of exposition and composition; in extending and enriching the domain of knowledge and fact; and finally, in producing and training the force of intellectual sympathy, which sharpens as well as intensifies insight into life and character, and gives to the mind that pliancy which directs the feeling heart to beat in sympathy with all forms of experiences, desires, and passions,—however far the lives and personalities may be removed from the author who constructs or describes them.