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

by Unknown

We will dismiss the coarse and caricatured distinction between realism and idealism, in which the one is supposed to render truthfully whatever is, without any principle of selection or composition; while the other starts with preconceived notions of the ought to be, be it from the point of view of formal beauty or spiritual harmony, and proves the facts that are. Art, and the novel above all,—which deals with life at once so clear and familiar to us, and so perplexingly manifold and varied as constantly to elude choice and design,—can neither forego truth nor unity of design.

But in the novelist's attitude towards human life there are two distinct points of view from which a new classification of novelists might be made: the position given to ethics, the moral laws in the presentation of life. The laws of human conduct are so essential to the relation of man to man, that the fundamental question as to what position ethics holds in our narrative cannot be ignored. The novelist must have decided whether he is going to consider its claims in the primary structure of his novel, and in the creation and development of characters, or not. Is he going to prepare the groundwork of artistic labor with a view to ethical design, or pure artistic design? It may be said that the best work requires both. But still, in so far as the one is heeded more than the other, will the writer be an idealist or a realist in this sense.

The idealist will focus his view of the characters, their experiences and sufferings and surroundings, from a view of moral fitness and design; the realist will find the design and composition, the harmony which all art needs, in the characters, in the scenes, in the life itself, and the inner organic relation of the parts to the whole. The one leads to the best idealism, the other to the best realism. The one produces a George Eliot, the other a Guy de Maupassant. This realist ignores the general fitness of things, the moral law, and says:—"This character is interesting in itself, this situation is amusing, curious, striking, or terrible,—they are worth depicting, without any question as to their relation to social or moral ideals." Guy de Maupassant takes characters and situations and depicts them with consummate art; he never troubles himself about general moral fitness, —we never know what his moral and social ideals are, nor whether he has any at all. Jane Austen is interested in her characters, in the tone and range of ideas of the period and the society in which she lives, the types of life, and she draws them with consummate art; but though we are left in no doubt in her case as to the good and the bad, and though the good generally prevails and the bad is defeated, these are not subordinated to a clear conception of an ideal social order, without which the characters and the story could not have been conceived and developed—as is always the case with George Eliot. Gwendolen Harleth, Felix Holt, Maggie, Dorothea, Lydgate, the life and surroundings of these figures, all bear a fixed relation to the social ideals of the author; and it is in this relation that she conceives and develops them. Nay, it is for the purpose of illustrating and fixing this that she creates them at all. Strange as it may sound, in so far Jane Austen might be called a realist and be classed with Guy de Maupassant; while George Sand, with whom she has so much similarity of spirit, is by contrast an idealist. It is a difference in the initial methods of dealing with life in fiction.

It is not enough for George Eliot to present an interesting character, to follow up its fate and growth, to force the reader into sympathy, to make him hope for success or fear failure; nor even to show the struggle with the surroundings, to depict interesting and complex situations and centres. Her writings always depend upon a primary postulate, and to this postulate all characters, scenes, and situations are ultimately subordinated. This postulate is: The ideal social order as a whole, the establishment of sane and sound social relations in humanity, the development and progress of human society towards such an ideal of general human life. All characters and situations, all scenes of life, whether clerical or provincial, whether of the present or of the past (and this may here be a grave fault), are developed and viewed by her in their relation to this general standard of ideal society; how far they fit into this general harmony, and failing this, how far they can in her stories be made to fit more fully; or they are left to a more tragic end which emphasizes the facts of their unfitness. Herein lies her distinctive character as a novelist, a point in which her delineation differs from most of the other great novelists—from a Balzac and a Flaubert, a George Sand, a Thackeray, and a Dickens, a Turgénieff and an early Tolstoy. I do not mean to say that these novelists had not a social ideal at the foundation of their constructive imagination; but it did not play that essential part in their conception and working out of characters and plots, it was not ever present in their minds while they were describing characters, feelings, incidents, and situations, as it appears to have been with George Eliot. Her philosophical and ethical bias thus manifests itself, in that there was an idea of general social fitness and happiness modifying and directing her representation of individual life and character.

To understand this social ideal of a rational and essentially sane world, we must conceive her as an expression of the spirit of the age out of which she grew. And she will thus hold a place not only as a novelist, but as a pregnant and significant exponent of the thought of the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

The time in which her mind was formed is marked on the side of social ethics, in that a broad and powerful humanitarian wave spread over English life and thought. Negatively it manifested itself in that it was a period of storm and stress toward the birth of tolerance—tolerance with all forms of belief and even unbelief. In the English Church itself, it was the period of clear accentuations of shades of belief that differed to a very marked degree from one another. The Church of Rome was brought nearer to the Anglican believer, and was robbed of its Apocalyptic horrors by a Newman and a Manning; a definite political act was the Irish Church Act. But an especial feature of this tolerance was the social recognition of agnosticism, in its scientific aspect through a Darwin, and in its more ethical aspect through a Mill, a Herbert Spencer, and a Matthew Arnold; while divines of the English Church itself, like Stanley, Maurice, Kingsley, and Jowett, bridged over the gaps between dogmatism and agnosticism. The repeal of the Test Act (according to which the signing of the Thirty-nine Articles was a condition for obtaining a scholarship or fellowship) abolished all disqualifications from freethinkers at the great universities. Quakers and Jews had before been admitted to Parliament, and now took prominent and leading places.

But more positively, the philosophy of Auguste Comte with its English exponents, especially Mill, impressed the religious feeling of humanitarianism. There had been a wave of this before, a wave the commotion of which was felt even in our days. It was the humanitarianism of Rousseau, under which George Sand stood. But this differs in a marked manner from that of our friend. With Rousseau it was deductive, based upon the inalienable rights of man, of the individual,—a deductive sociology. In our times it was essentially guided by the prevailing spirit and methods of thought of Charles Darwin, Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Clifford, and Matthew Arnold, with the regenerated and refined sense of truth which they have given to the world. It has thus led to an inductive sociology and inductive humanitarianism, freed from all romantic character and admixture, essentially sober and sane, though none the less passionate and deep-seated. The last wave of Rousseauesque feeling filtered through German sources to us in Carlyle and Ruskin. But this mode of thought was foreign to George Eliot. She disliked all forms of exaggeration.

She has always clear in her mind the sane and sober ideals of a society based upon the truthful observation and recognition of its wants and needs. The claims of truth, the claims of charity and unselfishness, are supreme. To this ideal the individual must subordinate himself if he wishes to be happy and noble, beloved and honored; must have "that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, which is to the moral life what the addition of a central ganglion is to animal life."

Pure applied psychology and knowledge of the coeur humain, which have actuated so many great novelists,—the careful and studied development of an individual life and character as such within its surroundings,—were not enough to absorb the desires of George Eliot's efforts in fiction; still less mere striking incidents, and the engrossing consequences and sequences as they push on in the plot of a story; but the coeur humain and incidents in life are viewed in their relation to society as a whole, to social ideals. She is thus an idealistic and an ethical novelist.

Even in her poetry this bias manifests itself; and here, from an artistic point of view, the effect is often more disturbing than in her novels. For in poetry the purely artistic, emotional, and lyrical aspect is more important and essential; and any general and impersonal ideal counteracts the reality of the characters, the mood, and the passion. Thus in her longest and greatest poem, 'The Spanish Gypsy,' the feelings and expressions put into the mouth of Fedalma and Zarca are the nineteenth-century thoughts and feelings of a George Eliot, and lose their immediate truthfulness and convincing power from being thus expressed by fictitious persons; while the personalities themselves, their thoughts and feelings, do not strike one with a sense of reality, because they express views which sound anachronistic and have not their proper local coloring. In spite of some beautiful shorter poems, passages, and lines, she fails when criticized as a lyrical poetess; nor will her poems stand faultless when judged from the epic point of view. But if there be any justification (which we hold there is) for didactic poetry,—poetry which calls in artistic emotion to impress truths and moral laws,—then she will always hold a prominent place in this sphere. 'Stradivarius' and the 'Positivist Hymn' will, together with Matthew Arnold's 'Self-Dependence,' rank among the finest types of didactic poems of our age.