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

by Unknown

Though at times her ethical bias has obtruded itself out of place, and may have counteracted her certainty of touch in drawing lifelike character (as for instance in the construction of Daniel Deronda's personality), it has, on the whole, not prevented her from giving full play to her marvelous power of clear and deep insight into life and of sensuous description.

In studying life she had learned observation in the scientific inductive school, and had thus acquired, with minuteness of perception, the clear-sighted and unprejudiced intellectual justice of vision which enabled her to appreciate fully and to grasp the inner core of all the characters, motives, and passions which her command over her thoughts and language and her docile pen enabled her to fix in so masterly a manner. But these faculties would not have been enough to lead to her creation of human types, had she not possessed to that intense and exalted degree the power of feeling which gave the initial stimulus to her penetration of the human heart and its motives and passions, and which her intellectual control converted into all-encompassing and all-pervading sympathy. She was, after all, what Elizabeth Browning expressed in the pregnant phrase—"a large-brained woman and a large-hearted man."

Nay, this sympathy was so intense and leading a feature of her genius that it again serves to establish a distinct general classification of novelists. Like great actors, great writers of fiction may be classified, according to their mode of rendering the life they study, as subjective and objective interpreters. The former are intellectually so wide and emotionally so responsive, that their great souls and minds grasp and assimilate, absorb for the time being, all the different natures which they portray; they thrill with them—they become them. The objective artists possess more the painter's and sculptor's attitude of mind; they eliminate self completely during the period of observation, and enter, through the fullness and delicacy of their perceptions, into the lives and characters they depict. For the time they see only the object of their study, and reproduce it with clear and dispassionate touch. This is the case with Balzac, Turgénieff, Thackeray, and Dickens. The objective method is the safest and least likely to produce faults in drawing which make the characters at times inconsistent and fall out of their parts; but the subjective method may at times attain depth of insight, and fullness of passion and veracity, which lies hidden from the dispassionate draughtsmen and impersonators. The Brontés had this subjective penetration to the highest degree; but they had not, on the other hand, the inductive and scientific training of George Eliot, which sobered down and made more objective, as it made more humorous, the sympathetic impersonations in her stories. Above all, the purely emotional subjectivity of George Eliot was counteracted by the passion for the general ethical and the social ideal which we have already considered as playing so essential a part in her mind. Upon this we must take our stand in order to appreciate her leading method of composition, which can be traced, we venture to believe, through all her novels.

Starting with a well-defined ideal of social fitness for this world, the harmony in life towards which all action, effort, and individuality must tend, the problem which each novel sets itself to solve is the reconciliation of the conflict arising out of the unfitness of the leading characters (the "hero" or "heroine," as we may call them) as measured by this ideal—the want of harmony between their characters, aspirations, and ambitions, their views of life, and on the other hand the surroundings in which they live. The Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, and all great dramatists, have ever dealt with this central struggle between man and society. But they started with this fact, and had merely the artistic aim of evoking sympathy and pity in the audience because of this tragic struggle, the powerful and perfect representation of which became the final aim of their artistic endeavor. With George Eliot the process of adaptation, the resolution of the discord, and if not the establishment of harmony, then the clear and impressive indication of the best way to its establishment, is the real motive and end of her writing. There is in her no great tragic fatalism, which makes the art of the Greek dramatist so deeply and overwhelmingly tragic. Each one of her leading characters is at fault, when viewed in the light of the healthy social ideal. In the exposition of the character the fault will be shown up strongly; the hero will either be developed into greater social perfection, or the tragic end will impress upon the reader the disease and its remedy, the bane and its antidote.

The social failings and shortcomings which stand in the way of this harmony are grouped by her into two leading faults of a general nature: the discord between the individual and selfish and the general and altruistic; between thoughtless social materialism and conformity, and questioning originality and spiritual revolt; between conventionality and originality; between common-sense and prophetic far-sightedness; between the Philistine and the artistic, the humdrum worker and the world-reformer, the materialist and the dreamer. The one looks down before him on the ground and ignores the heights beyond and the clear sky above, and in his heavy-footed advance shoves the sky-gazer aside and walks over him when he has fallen; the other gazes at the heights and the stars, and spurns the clod and soil, tripping over them,—nay, slipping in the mud. They each ignore one another and the world in which each lives, or they despise each other and their respective goals and aims.

Now, in all her novels this problem is repeated and a solution is attempted. Over and over again she presents this situation as the central point in the composition of her novels, in different layers of society, in most varied characters. And the understanding of this is the key to the understanding of George Eliot's works. She either brings it out in presenting two central figures as the contrasts which represent either faulty extreme, or one figure as opposed to the surroundings, or both these means are used to impress the central fact.

We shall take one pregnant instance to illustrate this: 'Daniel Deronda' has been estimated and criticized chiefly as a novel in which the Jewish question has been discussed by her in a dramatic manner. That it deals powerfully with this question is no doubt true; but the Jewish question is but a side issue—no doubt appealing to her deep sympathies and sense of justice; but it is not the central motive to the story nor the artistic keystone of the novel as constructed. The central figure in that story is Gwendolen Harleth (who ought properly to have given her name to the novel). The contrasting figure at the other extreme is Mordecai the Jew, and Daniel is the intermediary figure (almost figure-head) between these two extremes. The personality which, I am sure, set her sympathetic intellect and imagination throbbing into artistic creation was Gwendolen. As an ordinary though beautiful young lady of English society (in her rank what Hetty Sorrel and Rosamond Vincy are in theirs), she is the clod-born, materialistic, and hopelessly selfish representative of the unsocial member of a society in which ideas and ideals are unknown, and in which blind impulse, feebly directed by prejudice and tradition, petty vanity and greed, at most personal ambition, are the motives to action, and produce the discord and misery which surround even those who live in affluence. Her beauty, her position in her family, her whole education, have kept from her every higher ideal, all semblance of an ideal, and all altruism and feeling for or with her fellow-men. Her world in the opening of the story is the most contracted world of a small self, with a pervading passion out of all proportion to its extent, in which the desires whirl round and round this little circle in hideous compression. Now the fundamental problem of the story is: How can this little, selfish, and materialistic nature, which only realizes the things before its desiring eyes and grasping touch, be made large, unselfish, and idealistic, so that it reaches out beyond and above the world of self into the regions of great ideas, in which the individual is completely submerged; and that through this wholesome straining of the heart and of sympathetic power, through this realization and love of the ideal, it may learn to love and pity, and think for and in, mankind and all men and women? And this process of artistic development of character is sensuously and convincingly represented in this novel. The reader enters sympathetically into the little soul of that beautiful girl at the very beginning of the story, and in her he passes through all the phases, until without any forced hiatus he sees before him at the end the purified and enlarged Gwendolen, who has learnt her ennobling lesson in the great school of suffering. It is perhaps the greatest achievement in her art.

The more definite question is: How can such a girl realize the great world of ideas? The answer is: It must come through the heart, through the emotions and not the intellect,—the intellect will be widened and matured after her personality has been thrilled. She must fall in love with a man who is the impersonation of an idea, whose whole existence centres round a great desire far removed from the petty world of self in which she has lived,—nay, opposed to it, in direct contrast to it.

This impersonation is presented in Daniel Deronda; and the fault in the book is that George Eliot's theoretical bias has been too strong for her, and in her eagerness to make him the bearer of an idea to the central figure of the story she has sacrificed the realistic drawing of Daniel, who is an impersonation at the cost of flesh and blood. Given the fact that Daniel must in his personality represent some unselfish idea, the question was: What actual idea, great in extent and enough to fill a man's mind and soul, should be chosen? The difficulty here arose, that if George Eliot had chosen some purely imaginary topic it would have lacked reality, and would have moved neither Gwendolen nor the reader into sympathy. If on the other hand she had taken some stirring question of the day, the question as such would have engrossed the interest and attention of the reader, and would no longer have been subordinated to the chief artistic purpose it has in the story. As it is, to many, the Jewish question as treated and suggested in the novel has itself engrossed the attention of readers, and has diverted their minds from the main artistic gist of the story. But to the ordinary English reader the subject of Jewish social life and aspirations was sufficiently remote. Nay, so narrow are the sympathies and the intellectual horizon of many cultivated Englishmen, that though they can be interested in the lives of gipsies and farm laborers, they cannot "screw up an interest in those Jews."