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

before the pen was taken in hand, patiently thought out, planned with much care, and all available helps secured that could be had. She threw her whole life

inward labor which she had taken to work out her ideas. She never drew any of her facts or impressions from second hand; and thus, in spite of the number and variety of her illustrations, s

respondent praised Middlemarch, and expressed a hope that even a greater work might follow, she replied, "As to the 'great novel' which remains to be w

avier and heavier-does it not?-as the world grows older and the voices of the dead more numerous. It is difficult to believe, until the germ of some new work gro

ing the criticisms made on her books. She adopted this rule, she tells one correspondent, "as a necessary preservative against influences that would have ended by nullify

uched me with the more effect because you imply that you are young. I care supremely that my

will win my gratitude. He has carefully read through the articles which were accompanied by your kind letter, and he has a high opinion of the feeling and discernment exhibited in them. Some con

d certainly, apart from those relations in life which bring daily duties and opportunities of lovingness,

ly done. [Footnote: A reference to Hilda's ceasing to consider herself an original artist in the presence of the great masters. "Beholding the miracles of beauty which the old masters had achieved, the world

. L

e my own eyes are blue-gray. I am not in any sense one of the "good haters;" on the contrary, my w

th Bank, Regent's

31, 1881. This letter was addressed to

ciety, and away from all but a select few whose tastes and sympathies were largely in accordance with her own. Besides, she distrusted that common form of criticism which presumes to tell an auth

my works as that I groan under in the course of writing them, and I cannot imagine any edification coming to an author from a sort of reviewing which consists in attributing to hi

d even stronger words concerning

nse that they may get the best result from a book without necessarily forming an "opinion" about it, than I would rush into stating opinions of

as she was handled by the critics, no one of them was more vigorous than was her treatment of Young and Cumming. Even in later years, when she took up the critical pen, the

she might not be discouraged in her own work. Always busy with some special subject which absorbed all her ti

ch of the greatest writing which the centurie

d and dry, again gaudy and verbose. Sententious in her didactic passages, she is pure and noble in her sentiment, poetical and impressive in her descriptions of nature. Her diction is choice, her range of expression large, and she admira

evelopment of the action. Daniel Deronda contains two narratives which are in many respects almost entirely distinct from each other, and the reader is made to alternate between two worlds that have little in common. There is much of the improbable in the account of the Transome estate in Felix Holt, while the closing scenes in the life of Tito Melema in Romola are more tragical than natural. Yet these defects are incidental to her method and art rather than actual blemishes on her work. For the most part, her work is thoroughly unitary, cause leads naturally into effect, and there is a moral development of character such as is found in life itself. Her plots are strongly constructed, in simple outlines, are easily comprehended and kept in mind, and the leading motive holds steadily through to the end. Her analytical method often makes an apparent interruption of the narrative, and the unity of purpose is frequently developed through the philosophic purport of t

ial and hereditary limits; hence dramatic action is constantly arising. Shakspere and Browning only surpass her in dramatic power, as in the creation of character. Yet her method of producing character differs essentially from that of Shakspere, Homer and all the great creators. She describes character, while they present it. Homer gives no description of Hele

s it is delicate and exquisite; and it is invariably human and noble. She has an intense love and a wonderful appreciation of the ludicrous, sees whatever is incongruous In life, and makes her laughter genial and joyous. Her humor is the very quintessence of human experience, strikes deadly blows at what is unjust and untrue. It is both intellectual and moral, as Pr

ling humor and delight she can appreciate, as well as all the pain and sorrow that come to men and women; and she can fully enter into the life of her characters of every kind, and portray their inmost motives and impulses; but the foibles of the world she cannot tr

a guarantee of domestic comfort, whatever trials may await him out of doors. What a resource it is under fatigue and irritation to have your drawing-room well supplied with small mats, which would always be ready if you e

the account of Mr

teresting problem to the analytic mind. If, with a crushed heart and eyes half-blinded by the mist of tears, she were to walk with a too devious step through a door-place, she might crush her buckram sleeves, too, and the deep consciousness of this possibility produces a composition of forces by which she takes a line that just clears the door-post. Perceiving that the tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her strings and throws them languidly backward-a touching gesture, indicative, even in the deepest gloom, of the hope

rawn in any measure, yet it is more delicately managed. It is less open, less blunt, but hardly more subtle and penet

fe and the desirability of cut glass, the consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best

ing, and is a good specimen of that "laborious smartness," as Mr. R.H.

made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life toward another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust. And Lydgate fell to spinning that web from his inward self with wonderful rapidity, in spite of experience supposed to be finished off with the drama of Laure-in spite, too, of me

ater, German seems to have the preference. In The Mill on the Floss she describes Bob Jakin's thumb as "a singularly broad specimen of that difference between the man and the monkey." Such references to recent scientific speculations are not unfrequent. If they serve to show t

ht of prey, valuable chiefly for the excitements of the chase. Neither was he so well acquainted with the habits of primitive races as to feel that an

reader will quite catch t

ed into its pilulous s

intanceship? [Footno

largely increased upon George Eliot in her later books; but this is not true. In her Westminster Review essays both tendencies are st

her physical conditions refuse to support the energy required for spontaneou

rstanding of human experience with which her books abound. She often turns aside to discuss the problems suggested by the experiences of her characters, to point out how the effec

where he seems to bring his arm-chair to the proscenium, and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable th

heir true environment in her pages. She has a purpose larger than that of telling a story or of describing the loves of a few men and women. She seeks to penetrate into the motives of life, and to reveal the hidden springs of action; to show how people affect each other; how ideas mould the destinie

est detail, the feelings, motives, actions and surroundings of very commonplace and uninteresting people. Her reasons

work, that you would be likely to turn a harder, colder eye on the dusty streets and the common green fields-on the real breathing men and women, who can be chil

il is conscious of a delightful facility in drawing a griffin-the longer the claws, and the larger the wings, the better; but that marvellous facility, which we mistook for genius, is apt to forsake us when we want to draw a real unexaggerated lion. Exa

ets, sibyls and heroic warriors, to an old woman bending over her flower-pot, or eating her solitary dinner, while the noonday light, softened, perhaps, by a screen of leaves, falls on her mob-cap, and just touches the rim of her spinning-wheel and her stone jug, and all those cheap, common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her: or I turn to that village wedding, kept between four brown walls, where an awkward bridegroom opens

on the summit of their brows would be decidedly trying; yet, to my certain knowledge, tender hearts have beaten for them, and their miniatures-flattering, but still not lovely-are kissed in secret by motherly lips. I have seen many an excellent matron who could never in her best days have been handsome, and yet she had a packet of yellow love-letters in a private drawer, and sweet children showered kisses on her sallow cheeks

us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the regions of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house-those rounded-backs and stupid, weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world-those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have no picturesque sen

half so frequent as your common laborer, who gets his own bread, and eats it vulgarly, but creditably, with his own pocket-knife. It is more needful that I should have a fibre of sympathy connecting me with that vulgar citizen who weighs out my sugar in a vilely assorted cravat and waistcoat, than with the handsomest rascal in red scarf and green feathers; more needful that my heart should swell with loving admiration at

necessary for the highest purposes of the novelist. Hers are heart tragedies and spiritual histories; for life has its tragic, pathetic and humorous elements of the keenest interest under every social condition. Her realism is relieved, as in actual life, by love, helpfulness and pathos; by deep sorrow, sufferings patiently borne, and tender sympathy for others' woes. And if she sometimes sketches with too free a hand the coarse and repulsive features of li

I would rather surprise one of them by a pat and a pleasant morsel, than meet the cond

hem a warm place in our hearts, and we rejoice to have known them all. This ignorant rusticity is discovered to have charms and attractions of its own. Especially does

not pretend that his was an ordinary character among workmen." Yet such men as he are found among his class, and the noble qualities he possessed are not out of place a

to find there some good piece of road, some building, some application of mineral produce, some improvement in farming practice, some reform of parish abuses, with which their names are associated by one or two generations after them. Their employers were richer for them, the work of their hands has worn well, and the work of their brains has guided well the hands of other men. They went about in their youth in flannel or paper caps, in coats black with coal-dust or streaked with lime and red paint; in old age their white hairs are seen in a place o

he more manly and sturdy qualities of Adam Bede, and yet to George Eliot it was enough that he was human, that tr

whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint many years ago. "An utterl

they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people-many of them-bear a conscience, and have fe

experience of a human soul that looks out through dull gray eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones. In that case, I should have no fear

n flow in every direction. In this effort she has been eminently successful; and her loving sympathy with all that is human; her warm-hearted faith in the weak and unfortunate; the graciousness of her love for the common souls who are fa

characters, has an intense affection for them, pours out her motherliness upon them. Not so Daudet or James or Howells, who study crude life on the surface, and because it is the fashion. There is no heart-nearness in their work, little of passionate human desire to do justice to phases of life hitherto

abundant evidence of her painstaking, and of her anxious desire to be truthful. She has studied life on the spot, and gives to it the local coloring. In writing Romola, she searched into every corner of Florentine history, custom and thought. She is true to every touch of local incident and manner. In Daniel Deronda, she made herself familiar with Jewish life, and has given the race aroma to her portraits and scenes. She is thoroughly a realist, but a realist with a wide and attractive sympathy, a profound insight into motives and

le power she traces the growth of Tito Melema's mind through its perilous descent into selfish corruption, and with equal or even greater skill she unfolds the history of Daniel Deronda's development under the impulse to find for himself a life-mission. In this direction George Eliot is always great. Her skill is remarkable, albeit she has not sounded either the highest or the lowest ranges of human capacity. The range within which her studies are made is a wide one, however, and within it she has shown herself the master of human motives and a consummate artist in portraying the soul. She devotes the utmost care to describing some plain person who appears in her pages for but a moment, and is as much concerned that he shall be truly presented as if he were of the utmost consequence. More than one otherwise very ordinary character acquires under this treatment of hers the

ticularity. Through many pages Hetty's conduct in her own bedroom is laid before the reader, and in no other way could her nature have been so brought to our knowledge. Her shallow lightness of heart and her vanity could not be realized by ordinary intercourse with one so

vanity being a reference to the impressions produced on others; you will never understand women's natures if you are so excessively rational. Try rather to divest yourself of all your rational prejudices, as much as if you were studying the psychology of a canary-bird, and only watch the movements of this pretty round creature as she turns her head on one side with an unconsci

uliar manner, reference may be made to Baldassarre, in Romola. The descriptions of this man's sufferings, the giving way of his mind under them, and the purpose of revenge which took complete possession of him, form a study i

in the case of Daniel Deronda. His quiet love of ease as a boy is described as he sits one day watching the falling

lot, or have a very different part in the world from that of the uncle who petted him... But Daniel's tastes were altogether in keeping with his nurture: his disposition was one in which every-day scenes and habits beget not ennui or rebellion but delight, affection, ap

ep the growth of this longing, and to behold each new deed by which it is expressed. He craves for a broader life, but he is surrounded by such a social atmosphere as to make his longi

lective analysis which tends to neutralize sympathy. Few men were able to keep themselves clearer of vices than he; yet he hated vices mildly, being used to think of them less in the abstract than as a part of mixed human natures having an individual history, which it was the bent of his mind to trace with understanding and pity. With the same innate balance he was fervidly democratic in his feeling for the multitude, and yet, through his affections and imagination, intensely conservative; voracious of speculations on government and religion, yet loath to part with long-sanctioned forms which, for him, were quick with memories and sentiments that no argument could lay dead... He was ceasing to care for knowledge-he had no ambition for practice-unless they could both be gathered up into one current with his emotions; and he dreaded,

ng is satisfied. Step by step the reader is permitted to trace the expansion of his mind. A window is opened into his soul, and we see

h I might feel myself the heart and brain of a multitude-some social captainship,

rience, George Eliot by the slow development of the mind through all the stages of growth. He is impersonal, but she is always present to make comments and to expound the causes of growth. Yet her characters are as clear-cut, as individual, as his. His analysis is the more rapid, subtle and c

put their mark on literature," yet the critic needs to beware lest he give the speculative tendency in her mind a place too prominent compared with that assigned to her creative genius. The poet and the novelist are so seldom speculative, so seldom put into their creations the constant burden of great thoughts, that when one appears who does this, it is likely to be dwelt upon too largely by the critics. George Eliot speculates about life and its experiences, and it is evident she had a philosophy of life at her command; but it is quite as true that she soars on pinions free into the heavens of genius, and brings back the song which no other has sung, and which is a true song. She has created characters, she has described the histories of souls