In the moonlight it seemed to him that during his thirty years of absence the image had grown larger. That his eyes, accustomed to watch for unexpected perils, played him no tricks he was certain, yet he now observed the brow of the Sphinx to be wreathed in a faint vapour as if its crest had attained the altitude of no inconsiderable hill. The fissures between the stones seemed slightly to have filled, but the crevices across the face were both more numerous and more deeply scored. The pits of the eyes, too, had become immensely more cavernous. And—could he be mistaken?—was not the smile less ambiguous? Surely he did not remember the visage as so noble, or had it grown nobler in his absence? How was it that, though the aspect remained as unflinching as ever, the expression now seemed less hard and more magnanimously stern? The cheeks had undoubtedly sunk further, but did not the muscles appear tightened less in impatience than in endurance of suffering? The nostrils no longer breathed scorn; they laboured with the indrawing of breath that, like fire, was at once painful and inspiriting. To the brow there had been added, he thought, a faint line, and its coming had softened the contraction of the brows so that the creature appeared even more majestic and wiser than of yore. And lastly—he took long to discover this—in the shadow under the brows the orbs seemed to stir with a mysterious and darkling life. "O mighty Sphinx," he murmured, leaning his head upon her bosom, "what has come to thee? How art thou changed! Much I fear thou hast passed beyond so small, feeble, and ignoble an intelligence as I and that now I shall never learn the secret that, behind thy lips, lies locked in thy heart. O Sphinx, if I speak wilt thou answer? Time was when I came to thee and, impatiently stamping my foot upon the mound of thy illimitable desert, beating with my fists thine unanswering flesh, conjured thee in a voice of thunder to yield up thy secret. But to-night, nestling against thy bosom, how shall I speak to thee?—I, of less account among men than one of the myriad morsels of dust out of which thou art compounded; I, whose voice is to thine ears hardly louder than the scratch of the beetles that crawl about thy base; I, lost in the shadowy cleft between thy breasts? O Sphinx, I will not cry out to thine unregarding face, lost in such a reverie as transcends the thought of such as myself, but leaning here my fevered forehead against thy cool stones, as in a dream and scarcely expecting an answer, let me whisper to thy heart, 'What is the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx?'"
Then from within the Sphinx arose a deep murmuring as of a multitude of nigh-forgotten voices; a handful of vapour parted from the lips to wither in the glacial moonshine.
"Scarcely am I changed," said the Sphinx. "'Tis thou art changed. Look in thy heart: there is my secret."
So low had been the sound, so immense was the night, so lonely the desert, that Es-siddeeh doubted whether it was not his own heart that hadspoken. Then, placing both hands against the breast of the colossus, he cried in a despairing voice, "Is that thy all, O Sphinx?"
But there was no answer.
With spirit heavy as death, Es-siddeeh wrapped him in his cloak and laid him down to sleep between the paws.
"Alas," said he to himself, "how brief, how obscure, and how profitless seem all the answers given to man!" Yet, when the morning came, it occurred to him that, if the Sphinx had indeed spoken, he would do well to ponder the words.
So for three moons he sat pondering: "Scarcely am I changed. 'Tis thou art changed. Look in thy heart: there is my secret."
Those who crossed the desert marked him, sunk in the deepest travail of thought.
"Why do you not look at the Sphinx?" they asked.
"I begin to know something about it: that is why," he replied. "If I gazed at it always in the present and never in memory I should learn nothing."
One day a young scribe of great beauty approached the Sphinx and in a low tone enquired: "What is the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx?"
"Speak louder. She will not hear you," called his companion.
Es-siddeeh leaped to his feet.
"Who sent thee hither?" he cried.
"Sa-adeh, the Bestower-of-Felicity," answered the youth; and turning to his comrade, "If you wish to know why I do not shout, know that it is because I have read the early work of a certain scribe Es-siddeeh. It is very evident that, as with many persons of original mind, he scarcely recognised the full import of what he was at the time writing. Had he been acquainted with more scholars and had more experience of life he would have spoken with greater certainty. He would have also realised, too, I do not doubt, that his work was not so vain as it then appeared to him. But he disappeared and none knows whither, since his parents never spoke of him again. I, taking up his work, have already carried it further, I think, than he had when he abandoned it. Nevertheless I, too, have ceased to labour at it and am come hither for the purpose thou knowest."
"Sa-adeh," echoed Es-siddeeh, waking as if from a dream; "I seem to remember that name. Tell me now, how did you——"
But the stranger, receiving no reply from the Sphinx, had departed.
Es-siddeeh sat him down again in dejection.
That night he did not sleep. The memory of Sa-adeh overcame him with tears. All his life passed in review. Never had his reverie seemed so bitter, his questioning so futile as on that midnight, yet toward dawn he suddenly stood up with a shout. An immeasurable serenity flooded his being.
"I have it," he cried; "I have solved the secret of thy smile, O Sphinx!"
At that moment the tropic sun arose, and in its rays he beheld the face of the tormentor shine with an equable and golden splendour. The eyes, no longer lacking pupils, possessed sight, and from the smile had vanished all that he detested.
A new porter, a garrulous and slipshod wastrel, had taken the place of the old. It appeared that nowadays the Princess had but few visitors despite the fact that she was acknowledged almost as beautiful as ever, albeit in a different style. Her temperament, he learned, was difficult, her wealth greater than ever.
After but short delay he found himself in the antechamber. He acquainted the damsel with his mission. She vanished through the curtains, and the following conversation was borne to Es-siddeeh's ears:
"An old man, calling himself the Very Veracious, has arrived and sues for an interview on the same subject as his forerunners."
"I cannot see him." The maid returned.
"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that she is as beautiful as one red rose in a garden of lilies."
"The compliment," he heard the Princess remark, "though graceful, is not new; in fact so old that I scarcely distinctly recollect when I made a fashion for it. Dismiss him."
"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, "that her wisdom has the wings of the rukh, the eye of the falcon, the talons of the osprey, and the voice of the dove."
"The Very Veracious," he heard the Princess remark, "is there very much in the wrong. If I have learned nothing else in my life I have at least learned that my wisdom has no such enviable characteristics. Dismiss him."
"Tell her," said Es-siddeeh, suddenly overcome with a novel misgiving, "that I know the answer to all secrets, including the secret of the smile of the Sphinx."
"How original!" cried the Princess. "Does he really know the secret of the Sphinx's smile? Send him in."
Es-siddeeh went in and bowed down.
"Though changed," he said, "O Sa-adeh, you are as beautiful as ever."
"Your beard has grown so long and so white," she answered, "that—surely thouartthe (what is the name?) the Es-siddeeh I once knew, are you not?"
"I am."
"And you know all secrets?"
"I do."
Then she plied him with various questions concerning the value as an amulet of this or that precious stone, of the pedigree of famous horses, of music as an Emotional Sound or as an Architecture, and many other matters of a similar nature.
All these questions he answered with such a considerable wealth of detail that Sa-adeh appeared confused. Both fell silent.
After her eyes had rested for some time upon his face in a musing fashion, she asked with a strange inflection, "What is love?"
He was dumbfounded.
"I believe you have forgotten," she said, and in the intonation of her voice there was a hint of the equivocal.
His eyes filled with tears. "I have not forgotten," he said; "perhaps I am only just beginning to learn."
She gave him a curious look; then, moving her head, proceeded with an instant change of tone, "Well, what is the secret of the smile of the Sphinx?"
A wave of emotion swept over him. He smiled and arose.
"With the details of my enquiry I will not trouble you. Suffice it to say that for nearly forty years I have been searching."
"So long as that?"
"Many hard early days I spent in the desert and endured great privations."
"Indeed? I am sorry. Forget them."
"I would not if I could—they were the price of knowledge. At one time I came near losing my wits."
"So? I am sorry."
"Then I spent some years interrogating the wisest of earth."
"Oh?"
"But met with no answer."
"Ah."
"Then I spent further years in acquiring money—years of misery they were and years of degradation—that I might discover the secret. I was ruined. I repeat, I was ruined."
"Pardon me. Yes, you were ruined. I am sorry."
"I served as a soldier. I received wounds. I was captive. I was beaten. I escaped. I rose to power. I exploited all modes of living and fulfilling myself, but my experiments brought me no nearer the secret."
"No nearer...."
"Then I set forth on a dreary journey to renew my memory of the Sphinx's face. I sat down beside her. For a long time I learned nothing—the smile seemed hardly less mysterious than it had ever been. Then—but you are not listening...."
"My friend, I am indeed; you were on a dreary journey and——"
"At length one day a youth—but I will not burden you with that, though it was strange...."
"Why do you look so at me? I am listening."
"That night I learned the secret of the Sphinx."
"At last!"
"I learned it indeed."
"Yes. Well, what is it?"
"A difficult matter. You must listen most carefully, so subtle is its sense; yet in its comprehension lies hid the whole secret of man's possible happiness."
"I am listening."
There was a great stillness in the chamber. Es-siddeeh closed his eyes to concentrate his thought. Then, opening them, he began:
"I learned the secret—that smile is the secret."
"So I supposed."
"Hush, or I shall begin to think that you do not know how to value this gift of my whole life, which I am making you. It is very difficult, but if all men would listen to me their lives would be easier."
"I thought the secret was for me—yet no matter. Proceed. You see how serious I am."
"I learned its secret."
His lips trembled. He could hardly speak; at last with a great effort he said, "Now it comes—upon maintaining that smile, which is the sign of the power of her existence, all her energy is bent. She did not tell me, but I found it written in my heart. For what is she?In the Sphinx, with her ravaged countenance and mutilated smile, I behold Life itself—Life in mysterious might, ignorant of its own origin, conscious only of its own beauty, couchant amid the wilderness of space and eternity."
"Is the smile of the Sphinx all that indeed? I somehow thought it was something more intimate. But how serious you look! Do not frown—I would not offend you for the world."
"Should I not smile?" he said bitterly.
"Yes, like the Sphinx."
"Quick! How, did you know that?"
"Don't frighten me. I was but speaking idly."
"Idly?"
"Seriously then, if you like—since you attach such importance to it. Women always work by miracles and never know when they have performed one.... Excellent, you are smiling, though your smile is ambiguous."
"I do but obey her."
"Not me?"
"That smile which we behold on her face is the smile we see everywhere about us; only in her it has become more august—first by reason of her greater consciousness of isolation in the Desert and beneath the Stars, and, secondly, by consciousness of her strength."
"Will you hand me my fan? Thank you."
"For what are not the properties of the smile—the sovereign beauty, the witness of power—in Nature? Wise indeed the man who knows the bounds of what it is capable. When we are born the first thing we behold is a smile: the Nurse smiles at us, and in that smile we should read—were we then capable—the self-satisfaction of Nature, proud of her reproductive powers, who dandles us in her hands with the assurance that she knows what is best for us. Ah, how universal is the smile! Think of the variety of smiles that exist.'Tis all for smiles this life! And that is at once its apparent cruelty and its final justification. On the blackness of Eternity it expands in a smile like a rainbow—a rainbow whose arch begins and ends, as rainbow arches do, uncertain where. And this blossoming in Infinity justifies itself.... How? By the beauty of its smile. Therefore smile. Smile and be in harmony with—if not the spirit of the Universe (for the unknown looking down from the Hill of Heaven upon the Rainbow may for all we know smile also, and on the import of that smile opinion may be divided), and be in harmony at least with the beauty of that fragment of the Universe which, if we do not wholly comprehend, we can at least worship and imitate.... But you are yawning."
"No, obedient to you, I was—smiling."
"And for how long? Until we are resolved—as the drops of the rainbow are resolved after refracting supernal colours. Yet as a raindrop glitters, ere it evaporate upon the flower and be again (who knows?) drawn up in the immense cycle, with some reflection of the glory which its passage served to make, so should we maintain that smile to the moment of our dissolution. As indeed I, whose stormy aerial passage is nearly over, shall do till I attain to mine. For what commoner solace do we hear than that 'he died with a smile upon his face'? Such a smile may each have at his passing! How happy our friends will be to see it, how confounded our enemies! How comforted, too, the philosophers, who will not fail to perceive in it the reflection of whatever faith they hold: the ineffable joy of one whose beatified wings even now mingle with the wings of other spirits in divine assumption; the satisfaction of the racked, whom never again the torturers Joy and Sorrow will wake from endless sleep; the profound irony of one who never expected his pleasures to last for ever; and the disdain, too proud to curve itself in a full sneer, of one who opposes to the silent smile of the unknown a smile yet more silent!"
He paused.
"I have been thinking," said the Princess.
"You wish to know more? Shall I explain?"
"No. It is unnecessary; all this amounts to that you wish to marry me, and the announcement that you have earned the right to do so, but I should inform you that since you were last here a gentleman, who as a matter of fact once occupied a position menial enough but of importance in this household, has by signal honesty and perseverance arrived at a position where—well, in fact, to put it shortly, I have formed another attachment."
"Madam, am I reft of my senses? You astonish me! Who?"
"The Executioner."
"Ah, heavens! Well, let me inform you, madam, that I, too, have formed another attachment."
"You say that to my face! How dare you? But I saw directly you entered this room that you had long ago forgotten what true love is. Your longabsence from me bears it witness. Who, may I ask, is now the object of your affections?"
"Do not smile—or smile, madam, if you can; I love the Sphinx."
He had but that moment discovered it.
The Princess shrieked and at the sound he bent upon her such a smile as in memory effectually prevented her ever mentioning the Sphinx and its secrets again to anyone.
Then he walked out.
He returned to the Sphinx.
While yet afar off he was puzzled beholding a mountain range arisen in the wilderness. As he drew nearer he recognised it for the Sphinx. If during his thirty years' wanderings she had appeared to increase in size, to what dimensions had she not attained during his brief absence! The vapours of the desert, rising about her, had collected upon her shoulders in a strata of billowy cloud, and her head, unimaginably exalted, had now reached such an altitude that the features were almost indistinguishable in the blaze of the sun.
Night had fallen by the time that he stood within the canyon of her breasts. For a little he rested his head upon the rock. A great weariness descended upon him. Physical infirmity, the inevitable sequel of all he had suffered in body and in soul, now made him its prey. His mind and spirit, however, remained keen and unquenchable as ever. He wrapped himself in his cloak and lay down. At midnight he awoke. For the first time the Sphinx, speaking in a voice of more than mortal tenderness, had made utterance without being addressed, "Art thou returned, my lover?"
"Thou seest me. All I love I have given thee."
"Few have bestowed upon me so much as thou. Fewer still have arrived where thou hast arrived, while yet possessing the eye not wholly dimmed and the tongue not altogether palsied. One thing, however, thou hast kept from me—the seal that is on thy heart."
"Ah, Sphinx," replied Es-siddeeh, "that I cannot give; it is part of myself. Nor would I—for it was that which first brought me hither to scan thy face and to read thy riddle."
"I am a jealous lover."
"I know it. Yet what care I? Thy jealousy is a measure of my reward; for though I have discovered thy secret in general, yet it is a secret which no man perhaps will ever fathom in all particulars. Happy the hero who attains as far as I, happier yet he who can gaze unwinkingly upon thee as I do now, and hourly fathom something further!"
"I am a jealous lover. Thou hast not much longer to gaze."
"No matter. Eyes do not perish with me, and for myself I am rewarded."
Then was it that for Es-siddeeh the body and the face of the Sphinx achieved a final apotheosis. Her limbs throbbed with a deep and terribleenergy. From her breast issued an all embracing warmth similar to that of the earth. Her breathing became distinct as an august and stupendous rhythm resembling the ascent and descent of waters from firmament to firmament. Her cheeks flushed with a youthful elation. Into her eyes arose an immense light fixed upon unforetold futurities, and all her face, so worn and beautiful, became more ravaged and even more beautiful—for the very deepening scars, wasting and remoulding the features, gradually resolved the visage into an ethereal harmony hitherto unknown. Around her head, entangling in its mesh the nearer planets, there wreathed itself an enormous halo, iridescent as that which encircles the frosty moon. Her whole being exuded a supreme lustre until she became one living and colossal crystal which distributed in refraction all the colours of the rainbow and which palpitated with powers unguessed.
And to Es-siddeeh, who beheld her through the tears of one who momentarily expects to be parted, the spectra and the palpitance appeared in triple.
"O Sphinx, O Life the Enchantress," he cried, "my true and only love, take if thou wilt my heart and the seal upon it, for thine am I only, thee only would I aid, thee only do I love, thee only would I worship!"
*****
A band of Arabs, journeying across the desert, found him, when dawn came, lying between the paws of the giant—dead, more cold than the stone which surrounded him and which now began to kindle in the morning rays. Though there had been no dew, his garments were deluged as with the falling of an immense tear. Upon his face there lingered a fixed smile, and, gazing upward, they beheld its double in the sunlit face of the familiar Sphinx.
Here ends the story of the Smile of the Sphinx.Mayest thou also learn its secret.
By EDMUND GOSSE
INand after 1876, when I was in the habit of walking from the northwest of London towards Whitehall, I met several times, driven slowly homewards, a victoria which contained a strange pair in whose appearance I took a violent interest. The man, prematurely ageing, was hirsute, rugged, satyr-like, gazing vivaciously to left and right; this was George Henry Lewes. His companion was a large, thick-set sybil, dreamy and immobile, whose massive features, somewhat grim when seen in profile, were incongruously bordered by a hat, always in the height of the Paris fashion, which in those days commonly included an immense ostrich feather; this was George Eliot. The contrast between the solemnity of the face and the frivolity of the head-gear had something pathetic and provincial about it.
All this I mention, for what trifling value it may have, as a purely external impression, since I never had the honour of speaking to the lady or to Lewes. We had, my wife and I, common friends in the gifted family of Simcox—Edith Simcox (who wrote ingeniously and learnedly under the pen-name of H. Lawrenny) being an intimate in the household at the Priory. Thither, indeed, I was vaguely invited, by word of mouth, to make my appearance one Sunday, George Eliot having read some pages of mine with indulgence. But I was shy, and yet should probably have obeyed the summons but for an event which nobody foresaw. On the 18th of December, 1880, I was present at a concert given, I think, in the Langham Hall, where I sat just behind Mrs. Cross, as she had then become. It was chilly in the concert-room, and I watched George Eliot, in manifest discomfort, drawing up and tightening round her shoulders a white wool shawl. Four days later she was dead, and I was sorry that I had never made my bow to her.
Her death caused a great sensation, for she had ruled the wide and flourishing province of English prose fiction for ten years, since the death of Dickens. Though she had a vast company of competitors, she did not suffer through that period from the rivalry of one writer of her own class. If the Brontës had lived, or Mrs. Gaskell, the case might have been different, for George Eliot had neither the passion ofJane Eyrenor the perfection ofCranford, but they were gone before we lost Dickens, and so was Thackeray, who died whileRomolawas appearing. Charles Kingsley, whoseWestward Ho!had just preceded her first appearance, had unluckily turned into other and less congenial paths. Charles Reade, whoseIt is Never Too Late to Mend(1856) had been her harbinger, scarcely maintained his position as her rival. Anthony Trollope, excellent craftsman as he was, remained persistently and sensibly at a lower intellectual level. Hence the field was free for George Eliot, who, without haste or hesitation,built up slowly such a reputation as no one in her own time could approach.
The gay world, which forgets everything, has forgotten what a solemn, what a portentous thing was the contemporary fame of George Eliot. It was supported by the serious thinkers of the day, by the people who despised mere novels, but regarded her writings as contributions to philosophical literature. On the solitary occasion when I sat in company with Herbert Spencer on the committee of the London Library he expressed a strong objection to the purchase of fiction, and wished that for the London Library no novels should be bought, "except, of course, those of George Eliot." While she lived, critics compared her with Goethe, but to the disadvantage of the sage of Weimar. People who started controversies about "evolutionism,"—a favourite Victorian pastime,—bowed low at the mention of her name, and her own sound good sense alone prevented her from being made the object of a sort of priggish idolatry. A big-wig of that day remarked that "in problems of life and thought which baffled Shakespeare her touch was unfailing." For Lord Acton at her death "the sun had gone out," and that exceedingly dogmatic historian observed,ex cathedrâ, that no writer had "ever lived who had anything like her power of manifold but disinterested and impartial sympathy. If Sophocles or Cervantes had lived in the light of our culture, if Dante had prospered like Manzoni, George Eliot might have had a rival." It is very dangerous to write like that. A reaction is sure to follow, and in the case of this novelist, so modest and strenuous herself, but so ridiculously overpraised by her friends, it came with remarkable celerity.
The worship of an intellectual circle of admirers, reverberating upon a dazzled and genuinely interested public, was not, however, even in its palmiest days, quite unanimous. There were other strains of thought and feeling making way, and other prophets were abroad. Robert Browning, though an optimist, and too polite a man to oppose George Eliot publicly, was impatient of her oracular manner. There was a struggle, not much perceived on the surface of the reviews, between her faithful worshippers and the new school of writers vaguely called preraphaelite. She loved Matthew Arnold's poetry, and in that, as in so much else, she was wiser and more clairvoyant than most of the people who surrounded her, but Arnold presented an attitude of reserve with regard to her later novels. She found nothing to praise or to attract her interest in the books of George Meredith; on the other hand, Coventry Patmore, with his customary amusing violence, voted her novels "sensational and improper." To D. G. Rossetti they were "vulgarity personified," and his brother defined them as "commonplace tempering the stuck-up." Swinburne repudiatedRomolawith vigour as "absolutely false." I daresay that from several of these her great contemporaries estimates of her work less harsh than these might be culled, but I quote these to show that even at the height of her fame she was not quite unchallenged.
She was herself, it is impossible to deny, responsible for a good deal of the tarnish which spread over the gold of her reputation. Her early imaginative writings—in particularJanet's Repentance,Adam Bede, the first two-thirds ofThe Mill on the Floss, and much ofSilas Marner—had a freshness, a bright vitality, which, if she could have kept it burnished, would have preserved her from all effects of contemporary want of sympathy. When we analyse the charm of the stories just mentioned, we find that it consists very largely in their felicity of expressed reminiscence. There is little evidence in them of the inventive faculty, but a great deal of the reproductive. Now, we have to remember that contemporaries are quite in the dark as to matters about which, after the publication of memoirs and correspondence and recollections, later readers are exactly informed. We may now know that Sir Christopher Cheverel closely reproduces the features of a real Sir Roger Newdigate, and that Dinah Morris is Mrs. Samuel Evans photographed, but readers of 1860 did not know that, and were at liberty to conceive the unknown magician in the act of calling up a noble English gentleman and a saintly Methodist preacher from the depths of her inner consciousness. Whether this was so or not would not matter to anyone, if George Eliot could have continued the act of pictorial reproduction without flagging. The world would have long gazed with pleasure into the camera obscura of Warwickshire, as she reeled off one dark picture after another, but unhappily she was not contented with her success, and she aimed at things beyond her reach.
Her failure, which was, after all (let us not exaggerate), the partial and accidental failure of a great genius, began when she turned from passive acts of memory to a strenuous exercise of intellect. If we had time and space, it would be very interesting to study George Eliot's attitude towards that mighty woman, the full-bosomed caryatid of romantic literature, who had by a few years preceded her. When George Eliot was at the outset of her own literary career, which as we know was much belated, George Sand had already bewitched and thrilled and scandalised Europe for a generation. The impact of the Frenchwoman's mind on that of her English contemporary produced sparks or flashes of starry enthusiasm. George Eliot, in 1848, was "bowing before George Sand in eternal gratitude to that great power of God manifested in her," and her praise of the French peasant-idyls was unbounded. But when she herself began to write novels she grew to be less and less in sympathy with the French romantic school. A French critic of her own day laid down the axiom that "il faut bien que le roman se rapproche de la poésie ou de la science." George Sand had thrown herself unreservedly into the poetic camp. She acknowledged "mon instinct m'eût poussée vers les abîmes," and she confessed, with that stalwart good sense which carried her genius over so many marshy places, that her temperament had often driven her, "au mépris de la raison ou de la vérité morale," into pure romantic extravagance.
But George Eliot, whatever may have been her preliminary enthusiasms,was radically and permanently anti-romantic. This was the source of her strength and of her weakness; this, carefully examined, explains the soaring and the sinking of her fame. Unlike George Sand, she kept to the facts; she found that all her power quitted her at once if she dealt with imaginary events and the clash of ideal passions. She had been drawn in her youth to sincere admiration of the Indianas and Lelias of her florid French contemporary, and we become aware that in the humdrum years at Coventry, when the surroundings of her own life were arduous and dusty, she felt a longing to spread her wings and fly up and out to some dim Cloud-Cuckoo Land the confines of which were utterly vague to her. The romantic method of Dumas, for instance, and even of Walter Scott, appealed to her as a mode of escaping to dreamland from the flatness and vulgarity of life under the "miserable reign of Mammon." But she could not achieve such flights; her literary character was of a totally different formation. What was fabulous, what was artificial, did not so much strike her with disgust as render her paralysed. Her only escape from mediocrity, she found, was to give a philosophical interest to common themes. In consequence, as she advanced in life, and came more under the influence of George Henry Lewes, she became less and less well disposed towards the French fiction of her day, rejecting even Balzac, to whom she seems, strangely enough, to have preferred Lessing. That Lessing and Balzac should be names pronounced in relation itself throws a light on the temper of the speaker.
Most novelists seem to have begun to tell stories almost as early as musicians begin to trifle with the piano. The child keeps other children awake, after nurse has gone about her business, by reeling off inventions in the dark. But George Eliot showed, so far as records inform us, no such aptitude in infancy or even in early youth. The history of her start as a novel-writer is worthy of study. It appears that it was not until the autumn of 1856 that she, "in a dreamy mood," fancied herself writing a story. This was, I gather, immediately on her return from Germany, where she had been touring about with Lewes, with whom she had now been living for two years. Lewes said to her, "You have wit, description, and philosophy—those go a good way towards the production of a novel," and he encouraged her to write about the virtues and vices of the clergy, as she had observed them at Griff and at Coventry.Amos Bartonwas the immediate result, and the stately line of stories which was to close inDaniel Derondatwenty years later was started on its brilliant career. But what of the author? She was a storm-tried matron of thirty-seven, who had sub-edited theWestminster Review, who had spent years in translating Strauss'sLife of Jesusand had sunk exhausted in a still more strenuous wrestling with theTractatus Theologico-Politicusof Spinoza, who had worked with Delarive at Experimental Physics in Geneva, and who had censured, as superficial, John Stuart Mill's treatment of Whewell'sMoral Philosophy. This heavily-built Miss Marian Evans, now dubiously knownas Mrs. Lewes, whose features at that time are familiar to us by the admirable paintings and drawings of Sir Frederick Burton, was in training to be a social reformer, a moral philosopher, an apostle of the creed of Christendom, an anti-theological professor, anything in the world rather than a writer of idle tales.
But the tales proved to be a hundred-fold more attractive to the general public than articles upon taxation or translations from German sceptics. We all must allow that at last, however tardily and surprisingly, George Eliot had discovered her true vocation. Let us consider in what capacity she entered this field of fiction. She entered it as an observer of life more diligent and more meticulous perhaps than any other living person. She entered it also with a store of emotional experience and with a richness of moral sensibility which were almost as unique. She had strong ethical prejudices, and a wealth of recollected examples by which she could justify them. Her memory was accurate, minute, and well-arranged, and she had always enjoyed retrospection and encouraged herself in the cultivation of it. She was very sympathetic, very tolerant, and although she had lived in the very Temple of Priggishness with her Brays and her Hennells and her Sibrees, she remained singularly simple and unaffected. Rather sad, one pictures her in 1856, rather dreamy, burdened with an excess of purely intellectual preoccupation, wandering over Europe consumed by a constant, but unconfessed, nostalgia for her own country, coming back to it with a sense that the Avon was lovelier than the Arno. Suddenly, in that "dreamy mood," there comes over her a desire to build up again the homes of her childhood, to forget all about Rousseau and experimental physics, and to reconstruct the "dear old quaintnesses" of the Arbury of twenty-five years before.
If we wish to see what it was which this mature philosopher and earnest critic of behaviour had to produce for the surprise of her readers, we may examine the description of the farm at Donnithorne inAdam Bede. The solemn lady, who might seem such a terror to ill-doers, had yet a packet of the most delicious fondants in the pocket of her bombazine gown. The names of these sweetmeats, which were of a flavour and a texture delicious to the tongue, might be Mrs. Poyser or Lizzie Jerome or the sisters Dodson, but they all came from the Warwickshire factory at Griff, and they were all manufactured with the sugar and spice of memory. So long as George Eliot lived in the past, and extracted her honey from those wonderful cottage gardens which fill her early pages with their colour and their odour, the solidity and weight of her intellectual methods in other fields did not interfere, or interfered in a negligible way, with the power and intensity of the entertainment she offered. We could wish for nothing better. English literature has, of their own class, nothing better to offer than certain chapters ofAdam Bedeor than the beginning ofThe Mill on the Floss.
But, from the first, if we now examine coldly and inquisitively, there was a moth sleeping in George Eliot's rich attire. This moth was pedantry, theresult doubtless of too much erudition encouraging a natural tendency in her mind, which as we have seen was acquisitive rather than inventive. It was unfortunate for her genius that after her early enthusiasm for French culture she turned to Germany and became, in measure, like so many powerful minds of her generation, Teutonised. This fostered the very tendencies which it was desirable to eradicate. One can but speculate what would have been the result on her genius of a little more Paris and a little less Berlin. Her most successful immediate rival in France was Octave Feuillet; theScenes of Clerical Lifeanswer in time toLe Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre, andMonsieur de CamorstoFelix Holt. There could not be a stronger or more instructive contrast than between the elegant fairy-land of the one and the robust realism of the other. But our admirable pastoral writer, whose inward eye was stored with the harmonies and humours of Shakespeare's country, was not content with her mastery of the past. She looked forward to a literature of the future. She trusted to her brain rather than to those tired servants, her senses, and more and more her soul was invaded by the ambition to invent a new thing, the scientific novel, dealing with the growth of institutions and the analysis of individual character.
The critics of her own time were satisfied that she had done this, and that she had founded the psychological novel. There was much to be said in favour of such an opinion. In the later books it is an undeniable fact that George Eliot displays a certain sense of the inevitable progress of life which was new. It may seem paradoxical to see the peculiar characteristics of Zola or of Mr. George Moore inMiddlemarch, but there is much to be said for the view that George Eliot was the direct forerunner of those naturalistic novelists. Like them, she sees life as an organism, or even as a progress. George Eliot in her contemplation of the human beings she invents is a traveller, who is provided with a map. No Norman church or ivied ruin takes her by surprise, because she has seen that it was bound to come, and recognises it when it does come. Death, the final railway station, is ever in her mind; she sees it on her map, and gathers her property around her to be ready when the train shall stop. This psychological clairvoyance gives her a great power when she does not abuse it, but unfortunately from the very first there was in her a tendency, partly consequent on her mental training, but also not a little on her natural constitution, to dwell in a hard and pedagogic manner on it. She was not content to please, she must explain and teach as well.
Her comparative failure to please made its definite appearance first in the laboured and overcharged romance ofRomola. But a careful reader will detect it in her earliest writings. Quite early inAmos Barton, for instance, when Mrs. Hackit observes of the local colliers that they "passed their time in doing nothing but swilling ale and smoking, like the beasts that perish," the author immediately spoils this delightful remark by explaining, like a schoolmaster, that Mrs. Hackit was "speaking, we maypresume, in a remotely analogical sense." The laughter dies upon our lips. Useless pedantry of this kind spoils many a happy touch of humour, Mrs. Poyser alone perhaps having wholly escaped from it. It would be entirely unjust to accuse George Eliot, at all events until near the end of her life, of intellectual pride. She was, on the contrary, of a very humble spirit, timorous and susceptible of discouragement. But her humility made her work all the harder at her task of subtle philosophical analysis. It would have been far better for her if she had possessed less of the tenacity of Herbert Spencer and more of the recklessness of George Sand. An amusing but painful example of her Sisyphus temper, always rolling the stone uphill with groans and sweat, is to be found in her own account of the way she "crammed up" for the composition ofRomola. She tells us of the wasting toil with which she worked up innumerable facts about Florence, and in particular how she laboured long over the terrible question whether Easter could have been "retarded" in the year 1492. On this, Sir Leslie Stephen—one of her best critics, and one of the most indulgent—aptly queries, "What would have become ofIvanhoeif Scott had bothered himself about the possible retardation of Easter? The answer, indeed, is obvious, thatIvanhoewould not have been written."
The effect of all this on George Eliot's achievement was what must always occur when an intellect which is purely acquisitive and distributive insists on doing work that is appropriate only to imagination. If we read very carefully the scene preceding Savanarola's sermon to the Dominicans at San Marco, we perceive that it is built up almost in Flaubert's manner, but without Flaubert's magic, touch by touch, out of books. The author does not see what she describes in a sort of luminous hallucination, but she dresses up in language of her own what she has carefully read in Burlamacchi or in Villari. The most conscientious labour, expended by the most powerful brain, is incapable of producing an illusion of life by these means. George Eliot may even possibly have been conscious of this, for she speaks again and again, not of writing with ecstasy of tears and laughter, as Dickens did, but of falling into "a state of so much wretchedness in attempting to concentrate my thoughts on the construction of my novel" that nothing but a tremendous and sustained effort of the will carried her on at all. In this vain and terrible wrestling with incongruous elements she wore out her strength and her joy, and it is heart-rending to watch so noble a genius and so lofty a character as hers wasted in the whirlpool. One fears that a sense of obscure failure added to her tortures, and one is tempted to see a touch of autobiography in the melancholy of Mrs. Transome (inFelix Holt), of whom we are told that "her knowledge and accomplishments had become as valueless as old-fashioned stucco ornaments, of which the substance was never worth anything, while the form is no longer to the taste of any living mortal."
The notion that George Eliot was herself, in spite of all the laudation showered upon her, consciously in want of some element essential for hersuccess is supported by the very curious fact that from 1864 to 1869, that is to say through nearly one quarter of her whole literary career, she devoted herself entirely to various experiments in verse. She was so preternaturally intelligent that there is nothing unlikely in the supposition that she realised what was her chief want as a writer of imaginative prose. She claims, and she will always be justified in claiming, a place in the splendid roll of prominent English writers. But she holds it in spite of a certain drawback which forbids her from ever appearing in the front rank as a great writer. Her prose has fine qualities of force and wit, it is pictorial and persuasive, but it misses one prime but rather subtle merit, it never sings. The masters of the finest English are those who have received the admonitionCantate Domino!They sing a new song unto the Lord. Among George Eliot's prose contemporaries there were several who obeyed this command. Ruskin, for instance, above all the Victorian prose-writers, shouts like the morning-star. It is the peculiar gift of all great prosaists. Take so rough an executant as Hazlitt: "Harmer Hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as he passed!" That is the chanting faculty in prose, which all the greatest men possess; but George Eliot has no trace of it, except sometimes, faintly, in the sheer fun of her peasants' conversation. I do not question that she felt the lack herself, and that it was this which, subconsciously, led her to make a profound study of the art of verse.
She hoped, at the age of forty-four, to hammer herself into poetry by dint of sheer labour and will-power. She read the great masters, and she analysed them in the light of prosodical manuals. In 1871 she told Tennyson that Professor Sylvester's "laws for verse-making had been useful to her." Tennyson replied, "I can't understand that," and no wonder. Sylvester was a facetious mathematician who undertook to teach the art of poetry in so many lessons. George Eliot humbly working away at Sylvester, and telling Tennyson that she was finding him "useful," and Tennyson, whose melodies pursued him, like bees in pursuit of a bee-master, expressing a gruff good-natured scepticism—what a picture it raises! But George Eliot persisted, with that astounding firmness of application which she had, and she produced quite a large body of various verse. She wrote a Comtist tragedy,The Spanish Gypsy, of which I must speak softly, since, omnivorous as I am, I have never been able to swallow it. But she wrote many other things, epics and sonnets and dialogues and the rest of them, which are not so hard to read. She actually printed privately for her friends two little garlands,Agatha(1868) andBrother and Sister(1869), which are the only "rare issues" of hers sought after by collectors, for she was not given to bibliographical curiosity. These verses and many others she polished and re-wrote with untiring assiduity, and in 1874 she published a substantial volume of them. I have been reading them over again, in the intense wish to be pleased with them, but it is impossible—the root of the matter is not in them. There is anArion, which is stately in the manner of Marvell. The end of this lyric is tense and decisive, but there is the radicalabsence of song. In the long piece calledA College Breakfast Party, which she wrote in 1874, almost all Tennyson's faults are reconstructed on the plan of the Chinese tailor who carefully imitates the rents in the English coat he is to copy. There is a Goethe-like poem, of a gnomic order, calledSelf and Life, stuffed with valuable thoughts as a turkey is stuffed with chestnuts.
And it is all so earnest and so intellectual, and it does so much credit to Sylvester. After long consideration, I have come to the conclusion that the following sonnet, fromBrother and Sister, is the best piece of sustained poetry that George Eliot achieved. It deals with the pathetic and beautiful relations which existed between her and her elder brother Isaac, the Tom Tulliver ofThe Mill on the Floss: