III

All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

Nor would Thackeray have let this metaphor pass without adding to it Pope’s fine line:

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

Of course, there is another type of fiction in which running personal comment by the author would be out of place. It is illustrated in Dickens byA Tale of Two Cities, and in Thackeray byHenry Esmond. The latter seems to me the most perfect example of a historical novel in all literature. More than that,—it is, so far as I know, the best portrayal of the character of a gentleman.

The book presents itself as a memoir of Henry Esmond, Esq., a colonel in the service of her Majesty, Queen Anne, written by himself. Here, then, we have an autobiographical novel, the most difficult and perilous of all modes of fiction. If the supposed author puts himself in the foreground, he becomes egotistical and insufferable; if he puts himself in the background, he becomes insignificant, a mere Chinese “property-man” in the drama. This dilemma Thackeray avoids by letting Esmond tell his own story in the third person—that is to say, with a certain detachment of view, such as a sensible person would feel in looking back on his own life.

Rarely is this historic method of narration broken. I recall one instance, in the last chapter, where Beatrix, after that tremendous scene in the house of Castlewood with the Prince, reveals her true nature and quits the room in a rage. The supposed author writes:

“Her keen words gave no wound to Mr. Esmond; his heart was too hard. As he looked at her, he wondered that he could ever have loved her....The Prince blushed and bowed low, as she gazed at him and quitted the chamber.I have never seen her from that day.”

Thackeray made this slip on purpose. He wanted us to feel the reality of the man who is trying to tell his own story in the third person.

This, after all, is the real value of the book. It is not only a wonderful picture of the Age of Queen Anne, its ways and customs, its manner of speech and life, its principal personages—the red-faced queen, and peremptory Marlborough, and smooth Atterbury, and rakish Mohun, and urbane Addison, and soldier-scholar Richard Steele—appearing in the background of the political plot. It is also, and far more significantly, a story of the honour of a gentleman—namely, Henry Esmond—carried through a life of difficulty, and crowned with the love of a true woman, after a false one had failed him.

Some readers profess themselves disappointed with the dénouement of the love-story. They find it unnatural and disconcerting that the hero should win the mother and not the daughter as the guerdonof his devotion. Not I. Read the story more closely.

When it opens, in the house of Castlewood, Esmond is a grave, lonely boy of twelve; Lady Castlewood, fair and golden-haired, is in the first bloom of gracious beauty, twenty years old; Beatrix is a dark little minx of four years. Naturally, Henry falls in love with the mother rather than with the daughter, grows up as her champion and knight, defends her against the rakishness of Lord Mohun, resolves for her sake to give up his claim to the title and the estate. Then comes the episode of his infatuation by the wonderful physical beauty of Beatrix, the vixen. That madness ends with the self-betrayal of her letter of assignation with the Prince, and her subsequent conduct. Esmond returns to his first love, his young love, his true love, Lady Castlewood. Of its fruition let us read his own estimate:

“That happiness which hath subsequently crowned it, cannot be written in words; it is of its nature sacred and secret, and not to be spoken of, though the heart be ever so full of thankfulness,save to Heaven and the One Ear alone—to one fond being, the truest and tenderest and purest wife ever man was blessed with.”

I have left myself scant space to speak of Thackeray’s third phase in writing—his work as a moralist. But perhaps this is well, for, as he himself said, (and as I have always tried to practise), the preacher must be brief if he wishes to be heard. Five words that go home are worth more than a thousand that wander about the subject.

Thackeray’s direct moralizings are to be found chiefly in his lectures on “The Four Georges,” “The English Humourists,” and in the “Roundabout Papers.” He was like Lowell: as a scholastic critic he was far from infallible, but as a vital interpreter he seldom missed the mark.

After all, the essential thing in life for us as real men is to have a knowledge of facts to correct our follies, an ideal to guide our efforts, and a gospel to sustain our hopes.

That was Thackeray’s message as moralist. Itis expressed in the last paragraph of his essay “Nil Nisi Bonum,” written just after the death of Macaulay and Washington Irving:

“If any young man of letters reads this little sermon—and to him, indeed, it is addressed—I would say to him, ‘Bear Scott’s words in your mind, andbe good, my dear.’ Here are two literary men gone to their account, and,laus Deo, as far as we know, it is fair, and open, and clean. Here is no need of apologies for shortcomings, or explanations of vices which would have been virtues but for unavoidable, etc. Here are two examples of men most differently gifted—each pursuing his calling; each speaking his truth as God bade him; each honest in his life; just and irreproachable in his dealings; dear to his friends; honoured by his country; beloved at his fireside. It has been the fortunate lot of both to give incalculable happiness and delight to the world, which thanks them in return with an immense kindliness, respect, affection. It may not be our chance, brother scribe, to be endowed with such merit, or rewarded with such fame. But the rewards of these men are rewards paid toour service.We may not win the bâton or epaulettes; but God give us strength to guard the honour of the flag!”

With this supplication for myself and for others, I leave this essay on Thackeray, the greatest of English novelists, to the consideration of real men.

George Eliot was a woman who wrote full-grown novels for men.

Other women have done and are doing notable work in prose fiction—Jane Austen, George Sand, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Stowe, Margaret Deland, Edith Wharton, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Mrs. Humphry Ward—the list might easily be extended, but it would delay us from the purpose of this chapter. Let me rather make a general salute to all the sisterhood who have risen above the indignity of being called “authoresses,” and, without pursuing perilous comparisons, go directly to the subject in hand.

What was it that enabled George Eliot to enter the field of the English novel at a time when Dickens and Thackeray were at the height of their fame, and win a place in the same class with them?

It was certainly not the hide-and-seek of the sexof the new writer under a pseudonym. You remember, opinions were divided on this question. Carlyle and Thackeray thought that the author ofScenes of Clerical Lifewas a man. Dickens was sure that it was a woman. But a mystification of this kind has no interest apart from the primary value of the works of the unidentified writer in question. Nor does it last long as an advertisement, unless the following books excel the first; and, in that case, the secret is sure to be soon discovered.

George Eliot’s success and distinction as a novelist were due to three things: first, the preliminary and rather obvious advantage of having genius; second, a method of thinking and writing which is commonly (though perhaps arrogantly) called masculine; third, a quickness of insight into certain things, a warmth of sympathy for suffering, and an instinct of sacrifice which we still regard (we hope rightly) as feminine. A man for logic, a woman for feeling, a genius for creative power—that was a great alliance. But the womanhood kept the priority without which it would not only have died out,but also have endangered, in dying, the other qualities. Dickens was right when he said of certain touches in the work of this pseudonymous writer: “If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began.”

George Eliot’s profile resembled Savonarola’s. He was one of her heroes. But she was not his brother. She was his sister in the spirit.

Her essential femininity was the reason why the drawing of her women surpassed the drawing of her men. It was more intimate, more revealing, more convincing. She knew women better. She painted them of many types and classes—from the peasant maid to the well-born lady, from the selfish white cat to the generous white swan-sister; from the narrow-minded Rosamund to the deep-hearted, broad-minded Romola; all types, I think, but one—the lewdly carnal Circe. In all her books, with perhaps a single exception, it is a woman who stands out most clearly from the carefully studied and often complex background as the figure of interest. And even in that one it is the slight form of Eppie, the golden-heartedgirl who was sent to save old Silas Marner from melancholy madness, that shines brightest in the picture.

The finest of her women—finest not in the sense of being faultless, but of having in them most of that wonderful sacrificial quality which Goethe calleddas ewig Weibliche—were those upon whose spiritual portraits George Eliot spent her most loving care and her most graphic skill.

She shows them almost always in the revealing light of love. But she does not dwell meticulously on the symptoms or the course of the merely physical attraction. She knows that it is there; she confesses that it is potent. But it seems to her, (as indeed it really is,) far more uniform and less interesting than the meaning of love in thesoulof a woman as daughter, sister, sweetheart, wife. Were it not for that inward significance there would be little to differentiate the physical act from the mating of the lower animals—an affair so common and casual that it merits less attention than some writers give it. But in the inner life of thought and emotion, in a woman’s intellectual and moral nature,—therelove has its mystery and its power, there it brings deepest joy or sharpest sorrow, there it strengthens or maims.

It is because George Eliot knows this and reveals it with extraordinary clearness that her books have an especial value. Other qualities they have, of course, and very high qualities. But this is their proper and peculiar excellence, and the source, if I mistake not, of their strongest appeal to sanely thinking men.

The Man Who Understood Womanis the title of a recent clever trivial story. But of course such a man is a myth, an impostor, or a self-deluder. He makes a preposterous claim.

Thackeray and Dickens, for example, made no such pretension. Some of their women are admirably drawn; they are very lovable, or very despicable, as the case may be; but they are not completely convincing. Thackeray comes nearer than Dickens, and George Meredith, I think, much nearer than either of the others. But in George Eliot we feel that we are listening to one who does understand. Her women, in their different types, reveal somethingof that thinking, willing, feeling other-half of humanity with whom man makes the journey of life. They do not cover all the possibilities of variation in the feminine, for these are infinite, but they are real women, and so they have an interest for real men.

Let us take it for granted that we know enough of the details of George Eliot’s life to enable us to understand and appreciate certain things in her novels. Such biographical knowledge is illuminating in the study of the works of any writer. The author of a book is not an algebraic quantity nor a strange monster, but a human being with certain features and a certain life-history.

But, after all, the promotion of literary analysis is not the object of these chapters. Plain reading, and the pleasure of it, is what I have in mind. For that cause I love most of George Eliot’s novels, and am ready to maintain that they are worthy to be loved. And so, even if my “taken for granted” a few lines above should not be altogether accurate in these days of ignorant contempt of all that is“Victorian,” I may still go ahead to speak of her books as they are in themselves: strong, fine, rewarding pieces of English fiction: that is what they would remain, no matter who had written them.

It must be admitted at once that they are not adapted to readers who like to be spared the trouble of thinking while they read. They do not belong to the class of massage-fiction, Turkish-bath novels. They require a certain amount of intellectual exercise; and for this they return, it seems to me, an adequate recompense in the pleasurable sense of quickened mental activity and vigour.

But this admission must not be taken to imply that they are obscure, intricate, enigmatical, “tough reading,” like the later books of George Meredith and Henry James, in which a minimum of meaning is hidden in a maximum of obfuscated verbiage, and the reader is invited to a tedious game of hunt-the-slipper. On the contrary, George Eliot at her best is a very clear writer—decidedly not shallow, nor superficial, nor hasty,—like the running comment which is supposed to illuminate the scenes in a moving-picture show,—but intentionally lucid andperspicuous. Having a story to tell, she takes pains to tell it so that you can follow it, not only in its outward, but also in its inward movement. Having certain characters to depict (and almost always mixed characters of good and evil mingled and conflicting as in real life), she is careful to draw them so that you shall feel their reality and take an interest in their strifes and adventures.

They are distinctly persons, capable of making their own choice between the worse and the better reason, and thereafter influenced by the consequences of that choice, which, if repeated, becomes a habit of moral victory or defeat. They are not puppets in, the hands of an inscrutable Fate, like most of the figures in the books of the modern Russian novelists and their imitators. What do I care for the ever-so realistically painted marionettes in the fiction of Messrs. Gawky, Popoff, Dropoff, and Slumpoff? What interest have I in the minute articulations of the dingy automatons of Mijnheer Couperus, or the dismal, despicable figures who are pulled through the pages of Mr. Samuel Butler’sThe Way of All Flesh? A claim on compassion theymight have if they were alive. But being, by the avowal of their creators, nothing more than imaginary bundles of sensation, helpless playthings of irresistible hereditary impulse and entangling destiny, their story and their fate leave me cold. What does it matter what becomes of them? They can neither be saved nor damned. They can only be drifted. There is no more human interest in them than there is in the predestined saints and foredoomed sinners of a certain type of Calvinistic theology.

But this is not George Eliot’s view of life. It is not to her “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Within the fixed circle of its stern natural and moral laws there is a hidden field of conflict where the soul is free to discern and choose its own cause, and to fight for it or betray it. However small that field may be, while it exists life has a meaning, and personalities are real, and the results of their striving or surrendering, though rarely seen complete or final, are worth following and thinking about. Thus George Eliot’s people—at least the majority of them—have thehuman touch which justifies narrative and comment. We follow the fortunes of Dinah Morris and of Maggie Tulliver, of Romola, and of Dorothea Brooke—yes, and of Hetty Sorrel and Rosamund Vincy—precisely because we feel that they are real women and that the turning of their ways will reveal the secret of their hearts.

It is a mistake to think (as a recent admirable essay of Professor W. L. Cross seems to imply) that the books of George Eliot are characteristically novels of argument or propaganda. Once only, or perhaps twice, she yielded to that temptation and spoiled her story. But for the rest she kept clear of the snare ofTendenz.

Purpose-novels, like advertisements, belong in the temporary department. As certain goods and wares go out of date, and the often eloquent announcements that commended them suddenly disappear; even so the “burning questions” of the hour and age burn out, and the solutions of them presented in the form of fiction fall down with the other ashes. They have served their purpose, well or ill, and their transient importance is ended.What endures, if anything, is the human story vividly told, the human characters graphically depicted. These have a permanent value. These belong to literature. Here I would placeAdam BedeandSilas MarnerandThe Mill on the FlossandMiddlemarch, because they deal with problems which never grow old; but notRobert Elsmere, because it deals chiefly with a defunct controversy in Biblical criticism.

George Eliot was thirty-eight years old when she made the amazing discovery that she was by nature, not what she had thought herself, a philosophical essayist and a translator of arid German treatises against revealed religion, but something very different—a novelist of human souls, and especially of the souls of women. It was the noteworthy success of her three long short stories,Amos Barton,Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story, andJanet’s Repentance, printed inBlackwood’s Magazinein 1857, that revealed her to herself and to the world.

“Depend upon it, [she says to her imaginary reader in the first of these stories,] you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to seesomething of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of the human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes and speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.”

It was the interior drama of human life that attracted her interest and moved her heart with pity and fear, laughter and love. She found it for the most part in what we should call mediocre surroundings and on rather a humble and obscure stage. But what she found was not mediocre. It was the same discovery that Wordsworth made:

“A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.”

By this I do not mean to say that a close study of the humanness of human nature, a searching contemplation of character, an acute and penetrating psychological analysis is all that there is in her novels. This is her predominant interest, beyond a doubt. She belongs to the school of Hawthorne, Henry James, Thomas Hardy—realists or romancers of the interior life. But she has other interests; and there are other things to reward us in the reading of her books.

There is, first of all, an admirable skill in the setting of her stories. No other novelist has described English midland landscape, towns, and hamlets, better than she. No other writer has given the rich, history-saturated scenery of Florence as well.

She is careful also not to exclude from her stage that messenger of relief and contrast whom George Meredith calls “the comic spirit.” Shakespeare’s clowns, wonderful as some of them are, seem at times like supernumeraries. They come in to make a “diversion.” But George Eliot’s rustic wits and conscious or unconscious humourists belong to the story. Mrs. Poyser and Bartle Massey, Mrs. Glegg and Mrs. Tulliver and Bob Jakin, could not be spared.

And then, her stories are really stories. They have action. They move; though sometimes, it must be confessed, they move slowly. Not only do the characters develop, one way or the other, but the plot also develops. Sometimes it is very simple, as inSilas Marner; sometimes it is extremely complicated, as inMiddlemarch, where three love-stories are braided together. One thing it never is—theatrical.Yet at times it moves into an intense scene, like the trial of Hetty Sorrel or the death of Tito Melema, in which the very essence of tragedy is concentrated.

From the success ofScenes of Clerical LifeGeorge Eliot went on steadily with her work in fiction, never turning aside, never pausing even, except when her health compelled, or when she needed time to fill her mind and heart with a new subject. She did not write rapidly, nor are her books easy to read in a hurry.

It was an extraordinary series:Adam Bedein 1859,The Mill on the Flossin 1860,Silas Marnerin 1861,Romolain 1863,Felix Holt, the Radicalin 1866,Middlemarchin 1871,Daniel Derondain 1876; no padding, no “seconds,” each book apparently more successful, certainly more famous, than its predecessor. How could one woman produce so much closely wrought, finely finished work? Of what sturdy mental race were the serious readers who welcomed it and found delight in it?

Mr. Oscar Browning of Cambridge said thatDaniel Derondawas the climax, “the sun and gloryof George Eliot’s art.” From that academic judgment I venture to dissent. It is a great book, no doubt, the work of a powerful intellect. But to me it was at the first reading, and is still, a tiresome book. Tediousness, which is a totally different thing from seriousness, is the unpardonable defect in a novel. It may be my own fault, but Deronda seems to me something of a prig. Now a man may be a prig without sin, but he ought not to take up too much room. Deronda takes up too much room. And Gwendolen Harleth, who dressed by preference in sea-green, seems to me to have a soul of the same colour—a psychological mermaid. She is unconvincing. I cannot love her. The vivid little Jewess, Mirah, is the only character with charm in the book.

Middlemarchis noteworthy for its extraordinary richness of human observation and the unexcelled truthfulness of some of its portraits. Mr. Isaac Casaubon is the living image of the gray-minded scholar and gentleman,—as delicately drawn as one of Miss Cecelia Beaux’ portraits of aged, learned, wrinkled men. Rosamund Vincy is the typical“daughter of the horse-leech” in respectable clothes and surroundings. Dorothea Brooke is one of George Eliot’s finest sacrificial heroines:

“A perfect woman, nobly plann’d.”

The book, as a whole, seems to me to have the defect of superabundance. There is too much of it. It is like one of the late William Frith’s large canvases, “The Derby Day,” or “The Railway Station.” It is constructed with skill, and full of rich material, but it does not compose. You cannot see the people for the crowd. Yet there is hardly a corner of the story in which you will not find something worth while.

Felix Holt, the Radicalis marred, at least for me, by a fault of another kind. It is a novel of problem, of purpose. I do not care for problem-novels, unless the problem is alive, and even then I do not care very much for political economy in that form. It is too easy for the author to prove any proposition by attaching it to a noble character, or to disprove any theory by giving it an unworthy advocate. English radicalism of 1832 has quite passed away,or gone into the Coalition Cabinet. All that savesFelix Holtnow (as it seems to me, who read novels primarily for pleasure) is the lovely figure of Esther Lyon, and her old father, a preacher who really was good.

Following the path still backward, we come to something altogether different.Romolais a historical romance on the grand scale. In the central background is the heroic figure of Savonarola, saintly but not impeccable; in the middle distance, a crowd of Renaissance people immersed in the rich and bloody turmoil of that age; in the foreground, the sharp contrast of two epic personalities—Tito Melema, the incarnation of smooth, easy-going selfishness which never refuses a pleasure nor accepts a duty; and Romola, the splendid embodiment of pure love in self-surrendering womanhood. The shameful end of Tito, swept away by the flooded river Arno and finally choked to death by the father whom he had disowned and wronged, has in it the sombre tone of Fate. But the end of the book is not defeat; it is triumph. Romola, victor through selfless courage and patience, saves and protectsthe deserted mistress and children of her faithless husband. In the epilogue we see her likeNotre Dame de Secours, throned in mercy and crowned with compassion.

Listen to her as she talks to Tito’s son in the loggia looking over Florence to the heights beyond Fiesole.

“‘What is it, Lillo?’ said Romola, pulling his hair back from his brow. Lillo was a handsome lad, but his features were turning out to be more massive and less regular than his father’s. The blood of the Tuscan peasant was in his veins.

“‘Mamma Romola, what am I to be?’ he said, well contented that there was a prospect of talking till it would be too late to conSpirto gentilany longer.

“‘What should you like to be, Lillo? You might be a scholar. My father was a scholar, you know, and taught me a great deal. That is the reason why I can teach you.’

“‘Yes,’ said Lillo, rather hesitatingly. ‘But he is old and blind in the picture. Did he get a great deal of glory?’

“‘Not much, Lillo. The world was not always very kind to him, and he saw meaner men than himself put into higher places, because they could flatter and say what was false. And then his dear son thought it right to leave him and become a monk; and after that, my father, being blind and lonely, felt unable to do the things that would have made his learning of greater use to men, so that he might still have lived in his works after he was in his grave.’

“‘I should not like that sort of life,’ said Lillo. ‘I should like to be something that would make me a great man, and very happy besides—something that would not hinder me from having a good deal of pleasure.’

“‘That is not easy, my Lillo. It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tellit from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good. There are so many things wrong and difficult in the world, that no man can be great—he can hardly keep himself from wickedness—unless he gives up thinking much about pleasure or rewards, and gets strength to endure what is hard and painful. My father had the greatness that belongs to integrity; he chose poverty and obscurity rather than falsehood. And there was Fra Girolamo—you know why I keep to-morrow sacred:hehad the greatness which belongs to a life spent in struggling against powerful wrong, and in trying to raise men to the highest deeds they are capable of. And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of men, you must learn to fix your mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it. And remember, if you were to choose something lower, and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure and escape from what is disagreeable, calamity might come just the same; and it would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the oneform of sorrow that has no balm in it, and that may well make a man say, “It would have been better for me if I had never been born.” I will tell you something, Lillo.’

“Romola paused for a moment. She had taken Lillo’s cheeks between her hands, and his young eyes were meeting hers.

“‘There was a man to whom I was very near, so that I could see a great deal of his life, who made almost every one fond of him, for he was young, and clever, and beautiful, and his manners to all were gentle and kind. I believe, when I first knew him, he never thought of anything cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as his own safety, he came at last to commit some of the basest deeds—such as make men infamous. He denied his father, and left him to misery; he betrayed every trust that was reposed in him, that he might keep himself safe and get rich and prosperous. Yet calamity overtook him.’

“Again Romola paused. Her voice was unsteady, and Lillo was looking up at her with awed wonder.

“‘Another time, my Lillo—I will tell you another time. See, there are our old Piero di Cosimo and Nello coming up the Borgo Pinti, bringing us their flowers. Let us go and wave our hands to them, that they may know we see them.’”

Hardly one of George Eliot’s stories has a conventional “happy ending.” Yet they leave us not depressed, but strengthened to endure and invigorated to endeavour. In this they differ absolutely from the pessimistic novels of the present hour, which not only leave a bad taste in the mouth, but also a sense of futility in the heart.

Let me turn now to her first two novels, which still seem to me her best. Bear in mind, I am not formulating academic theories, nor pronouncingex cathedrâjudgments, but simply recording for the consideration of other readers certain personal observations and reactions.

Adam Bedeis a novel of rustic tragedy in which some of the characters are drawn directly from memory. Adam is a partial portrait of George Eliot’s father, and Dinah Morris a sketch of her aunt, a Methodist woman preacher. There is plenty of comic relief in the story, admirably done.Take the tongue duel between Bartle Massey, the sharp-spoken, kind-hearted bachelor school-master, and Mrs. Poyser, the humorous, pungent, motherly wife of the old farmer.

“‘What!’ said Bartle, with an air of disgust. ‘Was there a woman concerned? Then I give you up, Adam.’

“‘But it’s a woman you’n spoke well on, Bartle,’ said Mr. Poyser. ‘Come, now, you canna draw back; you said once as women wouldna ha’ been a bad invention if they’d all been like Dinah.’

“‘I meant her voice, man—I meant her voice, that was all,’ said Bartle. ‘I can bear to hear her speak without wanting to put wool in my ears. As for other things, I dare say she’s like the rest o’ the women—thinks two and two ’ull come to make five, if she cries and bothers enough about it.’

“‘Ay, ay!’ said Mrs. Poyser; ‘one ’ud think, an’ hear some folks talk, as the men war ’cute enough to count the corns in a bag o’ wheat wi’ only smelling at it. They can see through a barn door,theycan. Perhaps that’s the reason they can see so little o’ this side on’t.’

“‘Ah!’ said Bartle, sneeringly, ‘the women arequick enough—they’re quick enough. They know the rights of a story before they hear it, and can tell a man what his thoughts are before he knows ’em himself.’

“‘Like enough,’ said Mrs. Poyser; ‘for the men are mostly so slow, their thoughts overrun ’em, an’ they can only catch ’em by the tail. I can count a stocking-top while a man’s getting’s tongue ready; an’ when he outs wi’ his speech at last, there’s little broth to be made on’t. It’s your dead chicks take the longest hatchin’. Howiver, I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish: God Almighty made ’em to match the men.’

“‘Match!’ said Bartle; ‘ay, as vinegar matches one’s teeth. If a man says a word, his wife’ll match it with a contradiction; if he’s a mind for hot meat, his wife’ll match it with cold bacon; if he laughs, she’ll match him with whimpering. She’s such a match as the horsefly is to th’ horse: she’s got the right venom to sting him with—the right venom to sting him with.’

“‘What dost say to that?’ said Mr. Poyser, throwing himself back and looking merrily at his wife.

“‘Say!’ answered Mrs. Poyser, with dangerous fire kindling in her eye; ‘why,I say as some folks’ tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin’, not to tell you the time o’ the day, but because there’s summat wrong i’ their own inside.’ ...”

The plot, as in Scott’sHeart of Midlothian, turns on a case of seduction and child murder, and the contrast between Effie and Jeannie Deans has its parallel in the stronger contrast between Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris. Hetty looked as if she were “made of roses”; but she was, in Mrs. Poyser’s phrase, “no better nor a cherry wi’ a hard stone inside it.” Dinah’s human beauty of face and voice was the true reflection of her inward life which

“cast a beam on the outward shape,The unpolluted temple of the mind,And turned it by degrees to the soul’s essence.”

“cast a beam on the outward shape,

The unpolluted temple of the mind,

And turned it by degrees to the soul’s essence.”

The crisis of the book comes in the prison, where Dinah wrestles for the soul of Hetty—a scene as passionate and moving as any in fiction. Dinah triumphs, not by her own might, but by the sheer power and beauty of the Christian faith and love which she embodies.

In George Eliot’s novels you will find some passages of stinging and well-merited satire on the semi-pagan, conventional religion of middle-class orthodoxy in England of the nineteenth century—“proud respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without side-dishes”—read the chapter on “A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet,” inThe Mill on the Floss. But you will not find a single page or paragraph that would draw or drive the reader away from real Christianity. On the contrary, she has expressed the very secret of its appeal to the human heart through the words and conduct of some of her best characters. They do not argue; they utter and show the meaning of religion. On me the effect of her books is a deepened sense of the inevitable need of Christ and his gospel to sustain and nourish the high morality of courage and compassion, patience, and hope, which she so faithfully teaches.

The truth is, George Eliot lived in the afterglow of Christian faith. Rare souls are capable of doing that. But mankind at large needs the sunrise.

The Mill on the Flossis partly an autobiographicromance. Maggie Tulliver’s character resembles George Eliot in her youth. The contrast between the practical and the ideal, the conflict between love and duty in the heart of a girl, belong to thoseproblematische Naturen, as Goethe called them, which may taste keen joys but cannot escape sharp sorrows. The centre of the story lies in Maggie’s strong devotion to her father and to her brother Tom—a person not altogether unlike the “elder brother” in the parable—in strife with her love for Philip, the son of the family enemy. Tom ruthlessly commands his sister to choose between breaking with him and giving up her lover. Maggie, after a bitter struggle, chooses her brother. Would a real woman do that? Yes, I have known some very real women who have done it, in one case with a tragic result.

The original title of this book (and the right one) wasSister Maggie. Yet we can see why George Eliot chose the other name. The little river Floss, so tranquil in its regular tidal flow, yet capable of such fierce and sudden outbreaks, runs through the book from beginning to end. It is a mysterioustype of the ineluctable power of Nature in man’s mortal drama.

In the last chapter, when the flood comes, and the erring sister who loved her brother so tenderly, rescues him who loved her so cruelly from the ruined mill, the frail skiff which carries them clasped heart to heart, reconciled in that revealing moment, goes down in the senseless irresistible rush of waters.

It is not a “bad ending.” The sister’s love triumphs. Such a close was inevitable for such a story. But it is not a conclusion. It cries out for immortality.

On the art of George Eliot judgments have differed. Mr. Oscar Browning, a respectable authority, thinks highly of it. Mr. W. C. Brownell, a far better critic, indeed one of the very best, thinks less favourably of it, says that it is too intellectual; that the development and conduct of her characters are too logical and consistent; that the element of surprize, which is always present in life, is lacking in her people. “Our attention,” he writes, “is so concentrated on what they think that we hardly know how they feel, or whether ... theyfeel at all.” This criticism does not seem to me altogether just. Certainly there is no lack of surprize in Maggie Tulliver’s temporary infatuation with the handsome, light-minded Stephen Guest, or in Dorothea Brooke’s marriage to that heady young butterfly, Will Ladislaw. These things certainly were not arrived at by logical consistency. Nor can one lay his hand on his heart and say that there is no feeling in the chapter where the fugitive Romola comes as Madonna to the mountain village, stricken by pestilence, or in the passage where Dinah Morris strives for Hetty’s soul in prison.

George Eliot herself tells us the purpose of her art—it isverity.

“It is for this rare, precious quality of truthfulness that I delight in many Dutch paintings, which lofty-minded people despise.... All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women, and children—in our gardens and in our homes. But let us love that other beauty, too, which lies in no secret of proportion, but in the secret of deep human sympathy.”

It is Rembrandt, then, rather than Titian, whois her chosen painter. But she does not often attain his marvellouschiaroscuro.

Her style is clear and almost always firm in drawing, though deficient in colour. It is full of meaning, almost over-scrupulous in defining precisely what she wishes to express. Here and there it flashes into a wise saying, a sparkling epigram. At other times, especially in her later books, it spreads out and becomes too diffuse, too slow, like Sir Walter Scott’s. But it never repels by vulgar smartness, nor perplexes by vagueness and artificial obscurity. It serves her purpose well—to convey the results of her scrutiny of the inner life and her loving observation of the outer life in its humblest forms. In these respects it is admirable and satisfying. And it is her own—she does not imitate, nor write according to a theory.

Her general view of human nature is not essentially different from that expressed in a passage which I quoted from Thackeray in the previous chapter. We are none of us “irreproachable characters.” We are “mixed human beings.” Therefore she wishes to tell her stories “in such a way asto call forth tolerant judgment, pity, and sympathy.”

As I began so let me end this chapter—with a word on women. For myself, I think it wise and prudent to maintain with Plutarch thatvirtuein man and woman is one and the same. Yet there is a difference between the feminine and the masculine virtues. This opinion Plutarch sets forth and illustrates in his brief histories, and George Eliot in her novels. But of the virtues of women she gives more and finer examples.

One of the things that surprized and bewildered old Colonel Newcome when he gathered his boy’s friends around the mahogany tree in the dull, respectable dining-room at 12 Fitzroy Square, was to hear George Warrington declare, between huge puffs of tobacco smoke, “that young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael.” At this Charles Honeyman sagely nodded his ambrosial head, while Clive Newcome assented with sparkling eyes. But to the Colonel, sitting kindly grave and silent at the head of the table, and recalling (somewhat dimly) the bewigged and powdered poetry of the age of Queen Anne, such a critical sentiment seemed radical and revolutionary, almost ungentlemanly.

How astonished he would have been sixty years later if he had taken up Mr. Sidney Colvin’sLife of Keats, in the “English Men of Letters Series,” and read in the concluding chapter the deliberate andremarkable judgment that “by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shakespearean spirit that has lived since Shakespeare”!

In truth, from the beginning the poetry of Keats has been visited too much by thunder-storms of praise. It was the indiscriminate enthusiasm of his friends that drew out the equally indiscriminate ridicule of his enemies. It was the premature salutation offered to him as a supreme master of the most difficult of all arts that gave point and sting to the criticism of evident defects in his work.The Examinerhailed him, before his first volume had been printed, as one who was destined to revive the early vigour of English poetry.Blackwood’s Magazineretorted by quoting his feeblest lines and calling him “Johnny Keats.” The suspicion of log-rolling led to its usual result in a volley of stone-throwing.

Happily, the ultimate fame and influence of a true poet are not determined by the partizan conflicts which are waged about his name. He may suffer some personal loss by having to breathe, at times, a perturbed atmosphere of mingled flatteryand abuse instead of the still air of delightful studies. He may be robbed of some days of a life already far too short, by the pestilent noise and confusion arising from that scramble for notoriety which is often unduly honoured with the name of “literary activity.” And there are some men whose days of real inspiration are so few, and whose poetic gift is so slender, that this loss proves fatal to them. They are completely carried away and absorbed by the speculations and strifes of the market-place. They spend their time in the intrigues of rival poetic enterprises, and learn to regard current quotations in the trade journals as the only standard of value. Minor poets at the outset, they are tempted to risk their little all on the stock exchange of literature, and, losing their last title to the noun, retire to bankruptcy on the adjective.

But Keats did not belong to this frail and foolish race. His lot was cast in a world of petty conflict and ungenerous rivalry, but he was not of that world. It hurt him a little, but it did not ruin him. His spiritual capital was too large, and he regarded it as too sacred to be imperilled by vain speculations.He had in Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare and Chapman, Milton and Petrarch, older and wiser friends than Leigh Hunt. For him

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