Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (918 page)

During the three years Marian attended this school she held aloof from the other pupils, was grave and womanly in her deportment. She acquired Miss Rebecca Franklin’s slow and precise method of speaking, and to her diligent training owed her life-long habit of giving a finished completeness to all her sentences. It seems that her imagination was alive at this time, and being slowly cultivated. She was in the habit of scribbling verses in her books and elsewhere.

A fellow-pupil during the time she was a member of this boarding-school has given these reminiscences of Marian’s life there: “She learned everything with ease,” says this person, “but was passionately devoted to music, and became thoroughly accomplished as a pianist. Her masters always brought the most difficult solos for her to play in public, and everywhere said she might make a performer equal to any then upon the concert stage. She was keenly susceptible to what she thought her lack of personal beauty, frequently saying that she was not pleased with a single feature of her face or figure. She was not especially noted as a writer, but so uncommon was her intellectual power that we all thought her capable of any effort; and so great was the charm of her conversation, that there was continual strife among the girls as to which of them should walk with her. The teachers had to settle it by making it depend upon alphabetical succession.”

Leaving the school in Coventry at the age of fifteen, Marian continued her studies at home. The year following, her mother died; and this event, as she afterwards said, first made her acquainted with “the unspeakable grief of a last parting.” Soon after, her older sister and her brother were married and left home. She alone remained with her father, and was for several years his housekeeper. “He offered to get a housekeeper,” says Miss Blind, “as not the house only, but farm matters had to be looked after, and he was always tenderly considerate of ‘the little wench,’ as he called her. But his daughter preferred taking the whole management of the place into her own hands, and she was as conscientious and diligent in the discharge of her domestic duties as in the prosecution of the studies she carried on at the same time.” Her experiences at this period have been made use of in more than one of her characters. The dairy scenes in
Adam Bede
are so perfectly realistic because she was familiar with all the processes of butter and cheese making.

In 1841 her father gave up his business to his son and moved to Foleshill, one mile from Coventry. A pleasant house and surroundings made the new home, and her habits of thought and life became more exact and fastidious. The frequent absence of her father gave her much time for reading, which she eagerly improved. Books were more accessible, though her own library was a good one.

She zealously began and carried on a systematic course of studies, such as gave her the most thorough results of culture. She took up Latin and Greek with the head master of the Coventry grammar-school, and became familiar with the classic literatures. French, German and Italian were read in all the master-pieces of those languages. The Old Testament was also studied in the original; at the same time she became a proficient player on the piano, and obtained a thorough knowledge of music. During several years of quiet and continuous study she laid the foundations of that accurate and wide-reaching knowledge which was so notable a feature of her life and work. It was a careful, systematic knowledge she acquired, such as entitled her to rank as an educated person in the fullest sense. Her painstaking thoroughness, and her energetic application, were as remarkable at this time as in later years. Her knowledge was mainly self-acquired, but it was in no sense superficial. It is difficult to see in what way it could have been improved, even if the universities had been open to her.

Her life and her studies at Coventry have been well described by one who knew her. We are told that “in this somewhat more populous neighborhood she soon became known as a person of more than common interest, and, moreover, as a most devoted daughter and the excellent manager of her father’s household. There was perhaps little at first sight which betokened genius in that quiet gentle-mannered girl, with pale grave face, naturally pensive in expression: and ordinary acquaintances regarded her chiefly for the kindness and sympathy that were never wanting to any. But to those with whom, by some unspoken affinity, her soul could expand, her expressive gray eyes would light up with intense meaning and humor, and the low, sweet voice, with its peculiar mannerism of speaking — which by the way wore off in after years — would give utterance to thoughts so rich and singular that converse with Miss Evans, even in those days, made speech with other people seem flat and common. Miss Evans was an exemplification of the fact that a great genius is not an exceptional, capricious product of nature, but a thing of slow, laborious growth, the fruit of industry and the general culture of the faculties. At Foleshill, with ample means and leisure, her real education began. She acquired French, German and Italian from Signor Brezzi. An acquaintance with Hebrew was the result of her own unaided efforts. From Mr. Simms, the veteran organist of St. Michaels, Coventry, she received lessons in music, although it was her own fine musical sense which made her in after years an admirable pianoforte player. Nothing once learned escaped her marvellous memory; and her keen sympathy with all human feelings, in which lay the secret of her power of discriminating character, caused a constant fund of knowledge to flow into her treasure-house from the social world about her.”

Marian Evans early showed an unusual interest in religious subjects. Her parents belonged to the Established Church, while other members of the family were zealous Methodists. Religion was a subject which occupied much of their attention, and several of them were engaged in one way and another in its inculcation. Marian was an attentive listener to the sermons preached in the parish church, and at the age of twelve was teaching in a Sunday school held in a cottage near her father’s house. Up to the age of eighteen she was a most devoted believer in Christianity, and her zeal was so great that Evangelicalism came to represent her mode of thought and feeling. She was a somewhat rigid Calvinist and full of pious enthusiasm. After her removal to Coventry, where her reading was of a wider range and her circle of friends increased, doubts gradually sprang up in her mind. In a letter written to Miss Sara Hennell she gave a brief account of her religious experiences at this period. In it she described an aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, who was a Methodist preacher, and the original of Dinah Morris in
Adam Bede
.

There was hardly any intercourse between my father’s family, resident in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, and our family — few and far-between visits of (to my childish feeling) strange uncles and aunts and cousins from my father’s far-off native country, and once a journey of my own, as a little child, with my father and mother, to see my uncle William (a rich builder) in Staffordshire — but
not
my uncle and aunt Samuel, so far as I can recall the dim outline of things — are what I remember of northerly relatives in my childhood.

But when I was seventeen or more — after my sister was married and I was mistress of the house — my father took a journey into Derbyshire, in which, visiting my uncle and aunt Samuel, who were very poor, and lived in a humble cottage at Wirksworth, he found my aunt in a very delicate state of health after a serious illness, and, to do her bodily good, he persuaded her to return with him, telling her that
I
should be very, very happy to have her with me for a few weeks. I was then strongly under the influence of Evangelical belief, and earnestly endeavoring to shape this anomalous English-Christian life of ours into some consistency with the spirit and simple verbal tenor of the New Testament. I
was
delighted to see my aunt. Although I had only heard her spoken of as a strange person, given to a fanatical vehemence of exhortation in private as well as public, I believed that I should find sympathy between us. She was then an old woman — about sixty — and, I believe, had for a good many years given up preaching. A tiny little woman, with bright, small, dark eyes, and hair that had been black, I imagine, but was now gray — a pretty woman in her youth, but of a totally different physical type from Dinah. The difference — as you will believe — was not
simply
physical; no difference is. She was a woman of strong natural excitability, which I know, from the description I have heard my father and half-sister give, prevented her from the exercise of discretion under the promptings of her zeal. But this vehemence was now subdued by age and sickness; she was very gentle and quiet in her manners — very loving — and (what she must have been from the very first) a truly religious soul, in whom the love of God and the love of man were fused together. There was nothing highly distinctive in her religious conversation. I had had much intercourse with pious Dissenters before; the only freshness I found, in our talk, came from the fact that she had been the greater part of her life a Wesleyan, and though
she left the society when women were no longer allowed to preach
, and joined the New Wesleyans, she retained the character of thought that belongs to the genuine old Wesleyan. I had never talked with a Wesleyan before, and we used to have little debates about predestination, for I was then a strong Calvinist. Here her superiority came out, and I remember now, with loving admiration, one thing which at the time I disapproved; it was not strictly a consequence of her Arminian belief, and at first sight might seem opposed to it, yet it came from the spirit of love which clings to the bad logic of Arminianism. When my uncle came to fetch her, after she had been with us a fortnight or three weeks, he was speaking of a deceased minister, once greatly respected, who from the action of trouble upon him had taken to small tippling, though otherwise not culpable. “But I hope the good man’s in heaven, for all that,” said my uncle. “Oh, yes,” said my aunt, with a deep inward groan of joyful conviction, “Mr. A’s in heaven — that’s sure.” This was at the time an offence to my stern, ascetic, hard views — how beautiful it is to me now!

One who has been permitted to read the letters of Marian Evans written to this aunt, has given the following account of them, which throws much light on her religious attitude at this period: “Most of the epistles are addressed to my ‘dear uncle and aunt,’ and all reveal George Eliot’s great talents. The style is elegant and graceful, and the letters abound in beautiful metaphor; but their most striking characteristic is the religious tinge that pervades them all. Nearly every line denotes that George Eliot was an earnest biblical student, and that she was, especially in the years 1839 and 1840, very anxious about her spiritual condition. In one of these letters, written from Griff to Elizabeth Evans, in 1839, she says she is living in a dry and thirsty land, and that she is looking forward with pleasure to a visit to Wirksworth, and likens her aunt’s companionship and counsel to a spring of pure water, acceptable to her as is the well dug for the traveller in the desert. That the most affectionate and loving relationship existed between the eminent author and Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, is apparent from this correspondence. The inmost secrets of George Eliot’s heart are laid bare in these letters to the famous Methodist preacher, who was at that time her dearest friend. She is ever asking for advice and spiritual guidance, and confesses her faults with a candor that is rendered additionally attractive by reason of the polished language in which it is clothed. When quite a girl, George Eliot was known as pious and clever; and in the letters she wrote in 1839, when she was twenty years old, the cleverness has grown and expanded, although she is not so sure about her piety. She says that ‘unstable as water thou shalt not excel,’ seems to be a description of her character, instead of the progress from strength to strength that should be experienced by those who wish to stand in the presence of God. In another letter she admits that she cannot give a good account of her spiritual state, says that she has been surrounded by worldly persons, and that love of human praise is one of her great stumbling-blocks. But in a letter written in 1840 the uncertainty has gone from her mind, and she writes that she has resolved in the strength of the Lord to serve him evermore. In a later communication, however, she does not appear so confident, and admits that she is obliged to strive against the ambition that fills her heart, and that her fondness of worldly praise is a great bar and hindrance to spiritual advancement. Still she thinks it is no use sitting inactive with folded hands; and believing that the love of God is the only thing to give real satisfaction to human beings, she hopes, with his help, to obtain it. One of the letters is chiefly devoted to the concern felt by Marian Evans at Elizabeth Evans’ illness; and another, written at Foleshill, betrays some humor amid the trouble that afflicts her about her own future. Their outward circumstances, she writes, are all she can desire; but she is not so certain about her spiritual state, although she feels that it is the grace of God alone that can give the greatest satisfaction. Then she goes on to speak of the preacher at Foleshill, with whom she is not greatly pleased: ‘We get the truth, but it is not recommended by the mode of its delivery,’ is how she writes of this divine; yet she is charitable withal, and removes the sting by adding that more good may sometimes be obtained from humble instruments than from the highest privileges, and that she must examine her own heart rather than speak unkindly of the preacher. Up to this period it is evident that Marian Evans’ views upon religion were orthodox, and that her life was passed in ceaseless striving for the ‘peace that passeth understanding;’ but in 1843 a letter was written to Elizabeth Evans by a relative in Griff, in which Marian Evans is spoken of, and the change in her religious opinions indicated. She writes that they are in great pain about Mary Ann; but the last portion of the letter, dealing more fully with the subject, has unfortunately got lost or destroyed. The close association of George Eliot with Derbyshire, as well as her love for the quaint village of Wirksworth, and its upright, honest, God-fearing people, breaks forth in more than one of these communications.”