George Eliot; a Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and Philosophy

ther young couples, keeping house on a co-operative arrangement, with many attractions of social entertainment therewith. One result was the desertion of her home by Mrs. Lewes in connection with

ing to the laws of England at that time. He seems to have done what he could to ret

ife had deserted him, there sprang up a strong attachment between them, As they

reater freedom in this respect is desirable. There could have been no passionate individualistic defiance of law in her case, however. No one has insisted more strongly than she on the importance and the sanctity of the social regulations in regard to the union of the sexes. That her marriage was

excluded from society by this act, and her marriage was interpreted as a gross violation of social morality. To a sensitive nature, as hers assuredly was, and to one who so much valued the confidence of her friends as she did, such exclusion must have been a serious cross. She freely elected her own course in life, however, and she never seems to have complained at the results it brought her. That it saddened her mind

ngthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in a

r own experience, and it gives us a true insight into the spirit in which she accepted

needs, is not to be had when and how she will: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and f

Savonarola, who bids her return to her home and its duties. What the great prophet-priest says on this occasion we have every reason to believe expressed the true sentiments of George Eliot herself. He proclaims, what she doubtless thoroughly believed, that marriage is something far more than mere affection, more than love; that its obligation holds when all love is gone; that its obligation is so sacred and binding as to call for the

ees the path she must take, but sees, too, that the hot lava lies there. And the instinctive shrinking from a return to her husband brought doubts. She turned away her eyes from Fra Gi

e is not-my l

a false garb from all the obligations of your place and name. That would not have been if you had learned that it is a sacramental vow, from which none but God can releas

ed. "Heaven forbid! No;

be in the prison beside him. My daughter, if the cross comes to you as a wife, you must carr

involuntarily begun to say something which

or it: to die daily by the crucifixion of our selfish will-to die at last by laying our bodies on the altar. My daughter, you are a child of Florence; fulfil the duties of that great inheritance. Live for Florence-for your own people, whom God is preparing to bless the earth. Bear the

h his wife, we have an expression of the sacredness of marriage, and the renunciat

a, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her language brokenly-"I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear-but it m

should have consented to act in so individualistic a manner. She makes Rufus Lyon say-and it is her own opinion-that "the right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness." Her marriage, after the initial act, had in it nothing whatever of lawlessness. She believed there exists a higher rule than that of Parliament, and to this higher law she submitted. To her this was not a law of self-will and personal inclination, but the law of nature and social obligation. That she was not overcome by the German individualistic and social tendencies may be seen in the article on "Weimar and its Celebrities," in the Westminster Review, where, in writing of Wieland a

nt fitness and mutual attraction, tended to bring women into more intelligent sympathy with men, and to heighten and complicate their share in the political drama. The quiescence and security of the conjugal relation are, doubtless, favorable to the manifestation of the highest qualit

estriction, not the voluntary, contented self-restriction of love-in short, a marriage which is not spontaneously concluded, spontaneously willed, self-sufficing-is not a true marriage, and therefore not a truly moral marriage." As a moral and social obligation, marriage is to be held sacred; its sacredness grows out of its profound human elements of helpfulness, nurture and emotional satisfaction, while its obligation rises from its primary social functions. It

plied with. They regarded themselves, however, as married, and bound by all the ties and requirements which marriage imposes. They proclaimed themselves to their friends as husband and wife, and they were so accepted by those who knew them. I

ction,' said Mr. Lewes once in our hearing, 'is always desirable.' There are cases in which it is not always to be had. Such a ratification of the sacrament of affection was regarded as a sufficient warrant, under the circumstances of the case, for entrance on the most sacred engagement of life. There was with her no misgiving, no hesitation, no looking back, no regret; but always the unostentatious assertion of quiet, matronly dignity, the most queenly expression and unconscious affirmation of the 'divine right' of the wedded wife. We have heard her own oral testimony to the enduring happiness of this union, and can, as p

nt of almost natural tenderness in a man's protecting love: this patient, unwearying care for which no trifles are too small, watched over her own life; he stood between her and the world, her relieved her from all those minor cares which chafe and fret the artist's soul; he wrote her letters; in a word, he so smoothed the course of her outer life as to leave all her powers free to do what she alone could do for the world and for the many who looked to her for help and guidance. No doubt this devotion brought its own reward; but we are exacting for our idols and do not care to have even a generous error to condone, and therefore we are glad to know that, great as his reward was, it was no greater than was merited by the most perfect love that ever c

wn life approves it. We could wish it had not been, for the sake of what is purest and best; and yet it is not difficult to see that its effects were in many ways benefi

l talker, a marvellous story-teller, and a wit seldom rivalled. His intimate friend, Anthony Trollope, says, "There was never a man so pleasant as he with whom to sit and talk vague literary gossip over a cup of coffee and a cigar." By the same friend we are told that no man related a story as he did. "No one could say that h

ving thorough attention to anatomy and physiology. It is said that his horror of the dissecting-room was so great as to cause him to abandon the purpose to become a physician. All this time his mind was steadily drawn to philosophy, and he gave as much time to it as he could. The bent, of his mind was early developed, and in 1836, when only nineteen, he had projected a treatise on the philosophy of mind, in which he proposed to give a physiological interpretation to the doctrines of Reid, Stewart and Brown. At the age of twenty he gave a course of lectures on this subject; and to this line of thought he held ever aft

t," a three-act tragedy, published in 1852. His studies of Spinoza found expression in one of the first essays on the subject published in England. In 1843, he published in the Westminster Review his conclusions on that thinker. His essay was reprinted in a separate form, attracting much attention, and in 1846 was incorporated into a larger work, the result of his studies in Germany and of his interest in philosophy. In 1845, at the age of twenty-nine, he published a history of philosophy, in which he undertook to criticise all metaphysical systems from the inductive and scientific point of view.

. The following year he gave to the world an ambitious novel, Ranthorpe. It seems to have been well read in its day, was translated into German and reprinted on the continent by Tauchnitz. The plot is well conceived, but the story is rapidly told, full of incident and tragedy, and there is a subtle air of unreality about it. The experiences of a poet are unfolded in a romantic form, and th

is very different to any of the popular works of fiction; it fills the mind with fresh knowledge. Your experience and your convictions are made the reader's; and to an author, at least, they have a value and an interest quite unusual." In 1848, Lewes published another no

stminster Review, Fraser's Magazine, Blackwood's Magazine, Cornhill Monthly, Saturday Review, in the Classical Museum, the Morning Chronicle, the Atlas and various other periodicals, and on a great variety of subjects. His work of this kind was increased when in 1849 he became the literary editor of The Leader newspaper, a weekly journal of radical thought and politics. His versatility, freshness of thought and vigor of expression made this department of The Leader of great interest. His reviews of books were always good, and his literary articles piquant and forcible. In the first volume he published a story called The Apprenticeship of Life.

a critical biography of one of the great heroes of literature it is almost perfect. It is short, easily understood by common readers, singularly graphic, exhaustive, and altogether devoted to the subject." On the other hand, Bayard Taylor said that "Lewes's entertaining apology hardly deserves the name of a biography." It is an opinionated book, controversial, egotistic, and unnecessarily critical. It was written less with the purpose of interpreting Goethe to the English reader than of giving expression to Lewes's own views on man

ccount of his philosophy. From this time on to his death the greater part of his energies were given to these studies, and to the building up of a philosophy based on physiology. A popular work, in which many of his theories are unfolded, and marked throughout by his peculiar ideas in regard to the relations of body and mind, was published in 1858. This was his Physiology of Common Life, a work of great value, and written in a simple, comprehensive style, suited to the wants of the general reader. In the first volume he wrote of hunger and thirst, food and drink, digestion, structure and uses of the blood, circulation of the blood, respiration and suffocation, and why we are warm and how we keep so. The second treats of feeling and thinking, the mind and the brain, our senses and sensations, sleep and dreams, the qualities we inherit from our parents, and life and death. In 1860 he printed in The Cornhill Magazine a series of six papers on animal life. They were reprinted in book form in 1861, under the title of Studies in Animal Life. More strictly scientific than his Seaside Studies, t

der the management of its second editor, John Morley. Lewes edited six volumes, when, in 1867, he was obliged, on account of his health, to resign his position. He made the Review an independent and able exponent of current thought, and he kept it up to a very high standard of literary excellence. His own contributions were among the best things it contained, and give a good indication of the wide range of his talent. In the first volume he published papers on "The Heart and the Brain," and on the poetry of Robert Buchanan, as well as a series of four very able and valuable papers on "The Principles of Success in Literature." In the second volume he wrote about "Mr. Grote's

In 1875, a volume of these papers was published with the title, On Actors and the Art of Acting. It treated in a pleasant way, and with keen insight, of Edmund Kean, Charles Kean, Rachel, Macready, Fan-en, Charles Matthews, Frédéric Lemaitre, the two Keeleys, Shakspere as actor and critic

and Mind he gave to the world a new theory of the mind and of knowledge. In the first two volumes, published in 1874, and entitled The Foundations of a Creed, he developed his views on the methods of philosophic research. These were followed in 1877 by a third volume, on The Physical Basi

books readable, and even popular, giving philosophy an exposition suited to the wants of the general reader. At the same time, he was polemical and dogmatic, and more concerned to be clever than to be exact in his interpretation. Into the meanings of some o

recise and elegant mind, always that of a writer, often witty, measured, possessing no taste for declamation, avoiding exclusive solutions, and making its interest profitable to the reader whom he forces to think." Ribot speaks of the work again as being original but dogmatic and critical. He says it belongs to that class of books which make history a pretext for conflict. "The author is less occu

which gave an intense reality to Spinoza and his thoughts, which threw Hegel's contradictories into epigrams, and made the course of philosophic thought unfold itself naturally with all the life and coherence of a well-considered plot.... There can be no possible doubt as to the success of this method. Men to whom philosophy has been a wearisome swaying backward and forward of meaningless phrases, found something which they could remember and understand.... For a generation this 'entirely popular' book saturated the minds of the younger readers. It has done as much as any book, perhaps-more than any, to give the key to the prevalent thought of our time about the metaphysical problems.... That such a book should have had such a triumph was a singular literary fact. The opinions fra

along with the fact that the temper of the time made such a statement acceptable. It cleverly indicated the weak places in the metaphysical methods, and it presented th

not had in its whole history a greater illustration of the daring of speculation than in the case of Lewes's theory of the relations of the subjective and objective. He interprets matter and mind, motion and feeling, objective and subjective, as simply the outer and inner, the concave and convex, sides of one and the same reality. Mind is the same as matter, except that it is viewed from a different aspect. In this opinion he resembles Schelling more than any other thinker, as he does in some other of his speculations. As a monist, his conclusions are similar to those of the leading G

of Comte. Comte's theories of social and religious construction were repugnant to Lewes's mind, but his positive methods and his entire rejection of theology were acceptable. Comte's positivism was the foundation of his own philosophy, and he did little more than to expand

ity of intellectual conviction between them, and his books are in many ways the best interpreters of the ethical and philosophical meanings of her novels. Her thorough interest in his studies, and her comprehension of them, is manifest on many of her pages. Her enthusiastic acceptance of positivism in that spirit in which it is presented by Lewes, is apparent throughout all her work. Their marriage

tion. A good part of the year 1858 was also spent on the continent in study and travel. Three months were passed in Munich, six weeks in Dresden, while Salzburg, Vienna and Prague were also visited. The continent was again visited in the summer of 1865, and a trip was taken through Normandy, Brittany and Touraine. Other visits preceded and foll