Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 13

by Unknown

In 1849 the death of her father threw her into a state of deepest depression. It was then that her kind friends the Brays took her for a tour on the Continent, to Italy and Switzerland. She remained at Geneva in the family of the artist D'Albert for eight months, where she no doubt found congenial local associations; for the shores of the Lake of Geneva, haunted by the spirits of Calvin, Rousseau, Voltaire, Madame de Staël, Gibbon, Byron, and Shelley, seem bound up with world-stirring thought as no other place in Europe. Upon her return to England she made her home with the Brays at Rosehill for about a year, and then accepted the offer of Dr. John Chapman to become sub-editor of the Westminster Review and to make her home in his family. She here entered a circle of the most prominent literary men and women of the day, and among these she became an intimate friend of Herbert Spencer, John Oxenford, James and Harriet Martineau, George Henry Lewes, and others. Emerson she had met before at Rosehill. Besides her arduous sub-editorial work, she contributed several remarkable papers to the Review. Among these are: 'Carlyle's Life of Sterling' and 'Margaret Fuller' in 1852; 'Women in France: Madame de Tablé,' 1854; 'Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming,' 1855; 'German Wit: Heinrich Heine,' 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,' 'The Natural History of German Life,' 1856; 'Worldliness and Otherworldliness: the Poetry of Young' in 1857.

It was in 1854 that occurred the great event in her life; she joined George Henry Lewes as his wife, though the latter's wife was still alive. Lewes was separated from his first wife, though circumstances made it impossible for him to get a divorce. From that moment George Eliot remained the most faithful and devoted wife to Lewes and mother to his children, until his death in 1878. She united her life with that of Lewes after due and full deliberation, and with a thorough weighing of consequences and duties. But that she felt the deepest regret in that her complete union was not in accordance with the established laws of the society in which she lived, is evident from all her letters and writings; and though it need not have led to her marriage with her late husband Mr. Cross, the opportunity afforded of showing her respect to the established rules of matrimonial life must certainly have made it easier for her to form a new alliance, after the death of her first husband.

With Lewes she went to Germany, living for some time at Berlin and Weimar, while he was writing his 'Life of Goethe' and she was working at her translation of Spinoza's 'Ethics' and was contributing some articles on German literature. Upon their return they settled in London, finally in the Priory, North Bank, in the northwest of the metropolis, which was for many years a salon of the London literary world. The Sunday afternoons of this remarkable couple united all the talent and genius, residents or foreign visitors. One might meet in one and the same afternoon Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, Tennyson, Richard Wagner, Joachim the violinist, Huxley, Clifford, Du Maurier, and Turgénieff. Lewes, the most brilliant and versatile conversationalist of his day, gave life and freedom to these meetings; but the intellectual and moral centre always remained George Eliot, with her soft, sweet voice, her clear intonation, her friendly and encouraging smile, lighting up as by a contrast the earnestness of her serious and large features, which resembled those of Savonarola, whose character she has drawn in such strong lines in 'Romola.' But the quality of searching sympathy and benignant humor, so remarkable in her writings, gave the warmth of kindness and cordiality to these formidably intellectual meetings. The present writer remembers with grateful piety how, when he was a very young man struggling to put a crude thought into presentable form before these giants of thought and letters, she would divine his meaning even in its embryonic uncouthness of expression, and would give it back to him and to them in a perfect and faultless garb; so that in admiring and worshiping the woman, he would be pleased with his own thoughts and would think well of himself. It is this sympathetic and unselfish helpfulness of great and noble minds, which gives confidence and increases the self-esteem of all who come in contact with them. No wonder that one often saw and heard of a great number of people, young girls or young men, who by letter or in person sought help and spiritual guidance from her, and went away strengthened by her sympathy and advice.

Her first attempt at fiction was made when in her thirty-seventh year, in September 1856. The account of this is best shown in her own words here given among the extracts from her writings. Her first story was a short one, called 'The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton.' This was followed by 'Mr. Gilfil's Love Story' and 'Janet's Repentance,' and soon there was that remarkable volume called 'Scenes of Clerical Life.' Lewes and she and the world all realized that she was a true novelist, and from that moment she directed all her energies to the production of those works which will ever live, in spite of all changes of fashions and modes of story-telling, classical specimens of English fiction. In rapid succession now followed 'Adam Bede' in 1858; 'The Mill on the Floss' in 1860; 'Silas Marner' in 1861; 'Romola' in 1863; 'Felix Holt, the Radical,' in 1866; the poem 'The Spanish Gypsy' in 1868; 'Jubal and Other Poems' in 1870; 'Middlemarch' in 1872; 'Daniel Deronda' in 1876; and her last work, 'The Impressions of Theophrastus Such,' which was not published till after the death of Lewes, which occurred in 1878. She married Mr. Cross in May, 1880. She died on December 22d, 1880.

To lead to the fuller understanding of George Eliot's works, it was necessary to sketch in broad outlines the growth of her life and personality. As a writer she was not only a novelist but also a poet, and above all a social philosopher. Her ethical bias is so strong, moreover, that one cannot understand her as a novelist or a poet unless one has grasped her social philosophy and the all-pervading and ever-present influence it has upon her mind and writing.

In her delineation of character and depiction of scenes, especially those of rural and domestic life, truthful rendering is to her the supreme duty; and one need but open the 'Scenes of Clerical Life,' 'Adam Bede,' 'The Mill on the Floss,' 'Silas Marner,' and 'Middlemarch,' on any page, to realize the fullness of truth with which she has painted. At the time of their appearance, not only were the persons and the environment identified with the originals she had in her mind, but as lasting types they tallied exactly with people and local life known to each English reader. This truthful rendering was also conceived by her as a primary duty of the novelist. We would refer the reader to what, in an essay, she says of the English peasant in fiction, and would recall her own words in the same essay:—

"A picture of human life, such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of sentiment.... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the people. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life."

Another interesting passage is one containing an estimate of Dickens, in which she considers the Oliver Twists, Joes, and Nancys terrible and pathetic pictures of London life:—

"And if Dickens had been able to give us their psychological character, their conception of life, and their emotions, with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution to art ever made to the awakening of social sympathies."

George Eliot might thus be classified as one of the greatest if not the greatest realist of the analytical or psychological order. But this would, to our mind, be a one-sided and incomplete estimate of the chief character in her writing and genius. Truthful rendering of life and character may have been one of the chief motives to composition, and a fundamental requisite to the art of her fiction; but it remained a means to a further end—the ultimate end—of her writing, as it no doubt was the fundamental stimulus to her imagination and design. And this end and motive make her an idealist and not a realist in fiction. The direction in which this idealism goes we have indicated in the lines we have italicized in the passages we quote from her, and is to be found in the ethical motive below and beyond all her thought and composition, the predominance of the social philosophy in her fiction and poetry, to which we have already referred.