Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (940 page)

Very near this, Lopez is spoken of in this line:

That was not what he drew his sword at — he!

Such defects as these are not, certainly, of vital importance, and may doubtless be found in even the greatest poets; but they are noticeable here because of one texture with that which limits the quality of her poetic art. The principal criticism to be made on her poetry is that it was composed and did not create itself out of a full poetic mind. It was wrought out, was the result of study and composition, is wanting in spontaneity and enthusiasm. The most serious defect of her poetry is also the most marked defect of her prose, and this is a want of the ideal element. She was a realist by nature, and could not free herself from the tendency to look at the world on its surface only.

In her poetry George Eliot is much more a
doctrinaire
than in her novels. All her poems, except a few of the shorter ones, are devoted to the inculcation of some moral or philosophic teaching. The very effort she was obliged to make to give herself utterance in poetry predisposed her to intellectual subjects and those of a controversial nature. For this reason her verse has a special interest for those who are attracted to her teachings. Her pen was freer, more creative, in her great novels than in her poems. In fact, her novels, especially
Adam Bede
and
The Mill on the Floss
, are much more poetical than much she did in verse. In her verse she tried to present the more spiritual side of life, to make living and effective her own conceptions of the unseen and eternal. Yet she was burdened constantly in this effort by the fact that she had a new theory of the spiritual and ideal side of life to interpret. The poets who win the homage of mankind, and conquer all hearts to themselves, take the accepted interpretations of the great spiritual problems of life as the basis of their work and give those a larger, loftier meaning through their poetic and ideal insight and capacity of interpretation. They shun theories which must be expounded and interpretations for which no one is prepared. It is here George Eliot is seriously at fault as a poet, however much she may be commended as a teacher and reformer. Perhaps the truest piece of poetic work she did was
Agatha
, in which, however, there is a greater reliance than in most of her poems, on the accepted interpretations of spiritual beliefs. In portraying the trust, childlike and simple, of an old woman, and in endeavoring to realize the poetic elements of that trust and simplicity, she was very effective. In such work as this she would have been much more successful, from the strictly poetic point of view, than she has been, if she had not attempted to give her theories a clothing in verse. In her “Brother and Sister” she was also very successful, but especially so in the “Two Lovers.” There is an exquisite charm and power in some of these minor poems. Where the heart was free, and the intellect was not dominant and insistent on the importance of its theories, there was secured a genuine poetic beauty. There is true poetry in these lines:

  Two lovers by a moss-grown spring:
   They lean soft cheeks together there,
   Mingled the dark and sunny hair,
  And heard the wooing thrushes sing.
            Oh budding time!
            Oh love’s blest prime!

  Two wedded from the portal stept:
    The bells made happy carrollings,
    The air was soft as passing wings,
  White petals on the pathway slept.
            Oh pure-eyed bride!
            Oh tender pride!

There is a beauty and majesty in the poem on subjective immortality which is likely to make it, as it has already become, the one popular poem among all she wrote. There is a stimulus, enthusiasm and abandon about it which is attained but seldom in her other verses. The love of humanity, its passionate longing to sacrifice self for the good of all, is acceptable to much of the thought and purpose of the present time; and its spirit of sacrifice is one which may commend it to all earnest souls. In the more extended poems there is genuine accomplishment just in proportion as the leading purpose was artistic rather than philosophic or moral.

Difficult as it was for a successful novelist to secure applause as a poet, George Eliot overcame the distrust of her admirers and gained also a not unmerited place as a poet. Her verse has been a real addition to her work, and is likely to command an increasing interest in the future. That it is not always successful from the merely artistic point of view, that it is not to be placed by the side of the best poetry of the time, is no reason why it will not appeal to many minds and enlist its own company of admirers. Next after the universal poets are those who appeal to a select circle and charm a particular class of minds. Among these George Eliot will stand as one of the foremost and one of those most worthy of homage. As the poet of positivism, she will long delight those in sympathy with her teachings. It would be extravagant praise to call her a second Lucretius, and yet that which has given the Roman author his place among poets will also give George Eliot rank in the same company. With all his merits as a poet, it has not been his poetic power, or his love of nature, or his worth as an interpreter of human nature, which has given Lucretius his reputation as a poet. With real poetic power, — for he would have been a much smaller man without this, — he combined a philosophic mind and a daring genius for speculation. The poetry gave charm and ideal grandeur to the speculations, and the philosophy made the poetry full of meaning and earnest intellectual purpose. He read life and nature with a keener eye and a more profound penetration than others of his time; he tried to grasp the secret of the universe, and because of it he left behind the touch of a strong mind. In some such way as this, George Eliot’s poetry is likely to be read in the future. As poetry merely, it cannot take high rank; but for the sake of its philosophy, which is conceived as a poet would conceive it, there is promise that its future is to be one that is lasting. Even for poetry there must be thought, and the larger, profounder it is the better for the poetry, if it is imaginatively conceived and expressed. It is not thought, or even philosophy, which annuls poetry, but want of ideal and creative insight. To Goethe, Wordsworth or Browning there was a gain by enlargement of intellectual materials, but these were suffused in true poetic fire, and came forth a new creation. In so far as George Eliot has attained this result is she a poet, and is she sure of the future suffrages of those who accept her philosophy. At the least, her admirers must rejoice at the enlarged range of expression she secured by the use of the poetic form.

IX.

PHILOSOPHIC ATTITUDE.

George Eliot was pre-eminently a novelist and a poet; but she is also the truest literary representative the nineteenth century has yet afforded of its positivist and scientific tendencies. What Comte and Spencer have taught in the name of philosophy, Tyndall and Haeckel in the name of science, she has applied to life and its problems. Their aims, spirit and tendencies have found in her a living embodiment, and re-appear in her pages as forms of genius, as artistic creations. They have experimented, speculated, elaborated theories of the universe, drawn out systems of philosophy; but she has reconstructed the social life of man through her creative insight. What they mean, whither they lead, is not to be discovered nearly so plainly in their books as in hers. She is their interpreter through that wonderful insight, genius and creative power which enabled her to see what they could not themselves discover, — the effect of their teachings on man as an individual and as a social being.

Whoever would know what the agnostic and evolution philosophy of the time has to teach about man, his social life, his moral responsibilities, his religious aspirations, should go to the pages of George Eliot in preference to those of any other. The scientific spirit, the evolution philosophy, live in her pages, reveal themselves there in all their strength and in all their weakness. She was a thinker equal to any of those whose names stand forth as the representatives of the philosophy she accepted, she was as competent, as they to think out the problems of life and to interpret social existence in accordance with their theories of man and nature. Competent to grasp and to interpret the positive philosophy in all its details and in all its applications, she also had that artistic spirit of reconstruction which enabled her to apply to life what she held in theory. Along with the calm philosophic spirit which thinks out “the painful riddle of the earth,” she had the creative spirit of the artist which delights in portraying life in all its endeavors, complexities and consequences. She not only accepted the theory of hereditary transmission as science has recently developed it, and as it has been enlarged by positivism into a shaping influence of the past upon the present, but she made this law vital with meaning as she developed its consequences in the lives of her characters. To her it was not merely a theory, but a principle so pregnant with meaning as to have its applications in every phase of human experience. Life could not be explained without it; the thoughts, deeds and aspirations of men could be understood only with reference to it; much that enters into human life of weal and woe is to be comprehended only with reference to this law. In regard to all the other evolution problems and principles her knowledge was as great, her insight as clear, and her constructive use of them as original.

A new theory of life and the universe may be intellectually accepted as soon as its teachings are comprehended; but the absorption of that theory into the moral tissues, so that it becomes an active and constant impulse and motive in feeling and conduct, is a long and difficult process. It takes generations before it can associate itself with the instinctive impulses of the mind. It is one thing to accept the theory of universal law as an intellectual explanation of the sequences of phenomena, but it is quite another to be guided by that theory in all the most spontaneous movements of feeling, conscience and thought. A few minds are able to make such a theory at once their own by virtue of genius of a very instinctive and subtle order; but for the great majority of mankind this result can only be reached after generations of instruction. The use made of such theories by the poets and novelists is a sure test of their popular acceptance. When the poets accept such a theory, and naturally express themselves in accordance with its spirit, the people may soon feel and think according to its meaning.

The theory of evolution will not easily adjust the human mind to its conclusions and methods. It is therefore very remarkable that George Eliot, the contemporary of Comte, Spencer, Darwin, Lewes and Tyndall, should be able to give a true literary expression to their speculations. She has not only been able to follow these men, to accept their theories and to understand them in all their implications and tendencies, but she has so absorbed these theories into her mind, and so made them a part of all its processes, that she has painted life thoroughly in accordance with their spirit. Should the teachings of the evolutionists of to-day be finally accepted, and after a few generations become the universally received explanations of life and the universe, it is not likely any poet or novelist will more genuinely and entirely express their spirit than George Eliot has done. The evolutionary spirit and ways of looking at life became instinctive to her; she saw life and read its deepest experiences wholly in the light shed by this philosophy. For this reason her writings are of great value to those who would understand the evolution philosophy in its higher phases.

George Eliot accepted the intellectual conclusions of evolution, and the outline thus afforded she filled in with feeling and poetry. She interpreted the pathos, the tragedy, the aspirations of life in the light of this philosophy. Accepting with a bold and undismayed intellect the implications and consequences of evolution, rejecting or abating no least portion of it, she found in it a place for art, poetry and religion; and she tried to show how it touches and moulds and uplifts man. She shrank from nothing which would enable her to reveal how man is to live in such a universe as she believed in; she saw all its hardness, cruelty, anguish and mystery, and resolutely endeavored to show how these enter into and help to form his destiny. In doing this she followed the lead of the positivists in the acceptance of feeling as the basis and the true expression of man’s inner life. The emotional life is made the essential life; and all its phases of manifestation in art, poetry and religion are regarded as of great importance. George Eliot viewed the higher problems of life from this point of view, giving to the forms in which the emotional side of man’s nature is expressed a supreme importance. Religion, as the response of feeling to the mystery of existence, occupied a most important place in her philosophy. That her interpretation of the emotional elements of life is the true one, that she has discovered their source or their real ideal significance, may well be doubted; but there is every reason for believing that she realized their great value, and she certainly tried in an earnest spirit to make them helpful in the life of ideal beauty and truthfulness.

All that agnostic science and the evolution philosophy had to teach, George Eliot accepted, its doctrine of descent, its new psychology, and its theories of society and human destiny. Its doctrine of experience, its ethical theories, were equally hers. Yet into her interpretation of existence went a woman’s heart, the widest and tenderest sympathy, and a quick yearning purpose to do what good she could in the world. She saw with the lover’s eyes, motherhood revealed itself in her soul, the child’s trust was in her heart. The new philosophy she applied to life, revealed its relations to duty, love, sorrow, trial and death. To her it had a deep social meaning, a vital connection with the heart, its hopes and its burdens, and for her it touched the spiritual content of life with reality. It was in this way she became the truest interpreter of the evolution philosophy, the best apostle of the ethics taught by agnostic science. She not only speculated, she also felt and lived. Philosophy was to her more than an abstract theory of the universe; into it entered a tender sympathy for all human weakness, a profound sense of the mystery of existence, and a holy purpose to make life pure and true to all she could reach. This larger comprehension gives a new significance to her interpretation of evolution. It makes it impossible that this philosophy should be fully understood without a study of her books.